The Effects Of Facial Expression Manipulation On Emotional Experience Of The General Population And Minor Depression Patients

From the view of embodied emotional theory, the body motion (E.G., facial expression, body posture) will take effect on the perception, recognition, understanding and processing of emotional stimuli. Especially, researchers focused more on the facial expression modulation on the emotional cognition. They found that individuals would implicitly mimic the facial expression to understanding the emotional stimuli when recognizing emotional information. This point of view was called facial mimic theory.Recently, researches about embodied emotion provided sufficient evidences that facial expression modulation could take effect on the process of emotional cognition, and put forward several processing models about the effect. However, how the facial expression influenced the process of emotional recognition and understanding kept unclear. The main dispute empathized on the role of facial feedback during the process of emotional cognition, however, researches about influence factors and cognitive neuron basis were nearly blank, as well as the topic of long-term facial expression manipulation effect. In details, our research focused on six questions as follows:1) the debate of facial expression manipulation effect kept unclear, whether the classic experiment can be repeated responded to the vital problem in the range of embodied emotion; 2) a lot of researches proved that the processing of positive and negative emotions had different mechanism, can facial expression manipulation affect both positive and negative emotions? 3) former researches found emotional state could take effect on the emotional information process, therefore it’s important to find out how the emotional states and facial expression manipulation took effect on the processing of emotional cognition at the same time; 4) what kind of participants were sensitive to facial expression manipulation? Can we have validated scales to distinguish more sensitive participants? 5) previous researches focused on normal subjects, however, whether the facial expression manipulation effect could fit the depressive subjects kept unknown; 6) can positive facial expression training facilitate the therapeutic effect for minor depressive subjects?In fact, during the past twenty decades, with the rapid development of embodied cognition, the most challenge part of embodied experiments was the problem of replicability. Our research began with replicating the traditional model of embodied facial expression and taking using of self-report scales to measure the modulating effect of facial expression. On bases of this validating study, we further explored the influence effect of previous emotion and emotional contagion ability on the facial manipulating effects. Our result showed that previous emotion and facial expression manipulation took a joint effect on the recognition of emotional facial expression, while facial expression manipulation influenced more on participants with high ability of emotional contagion, comparing with participants with low ability of emotional contagion. Specially, our researches took use of event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the neuropsychological bases of how the facial expression manipulation influenced the emotional experiences. We found both Duchenne-smile and standard-smile could decrease the amplitude of Error-Related Negativity (ERN) for normal groups and minor depressive groups. This result might due to the short-term positive emotion induced by smile manipulation, which could increase brain dopamine level in a variety of dopaminergic structures, even for MinD patients who had a long-term negative state.Lastly, in order to promote the clinical application of facial manipulation and training, we designed smile-training software to facilitate the standard cognitive-behavior group therapy of minor depressive patients. Our result indicated that positive facial expression training might promote the smooth and long-term therapeutical changes, which provided experimental basis of evidence-based practices.Taken together, the present study suggests that:firstly, the traditional facial manipulation experiments can be replicated, the manipulation of frown can induce more negative emotions, while the manipulation of Duchenne-smile can induce positive emotions; Secondly, induced emotion and facial manipulation takes a joint effect on the recognition of emotional facial expression, while facial manipulation affects more on participants with high ability of emotional contagion; Thirdly, both Duchenne-smile and standard-smile could decrease the amplitude of Error-Related Negativity (ERN) for normal groups and minor depressive groups. These findings will contribute to our understanding of how facial expressions influence embodied emotion.