Feeling bad and looking worse: negative affect is associated with reduced perceptions of face-healthiness.
TL;DR: The role of emotions in enhancement and derogation effects is investigated; specifically, whether the propensity to experience positive and negative emotions affects how healthy the authors perceive their own face to look and how they judge ourselves against others.
Abstract: Some people perceive themselves to look more, or less attractive than they are in reality. We investigated the role of emotions in enhancement and derogation effects; specifically, whether the propensity to experience positive and negative emotions affects how healthy we perceive our own face to look and how we judge ourselves against others. A psychophysical method was used to measure healthiness of self-image and social comparisons of healthiness. Participants who self-reported high positive (N = 20) or negative affectivity (N = 20) judged themselves against healthy (red-tinged) and unhealthy looking (green-tinged) versions of their own and stranger’s faces. An adaptive staircase procedure was used to measure perceptual thresholds. Participants high in positive affectivity were un-biased in their face health judgement. Participants high in negative affectivity on the other hand, judged themselves as equivalent to less healthy looking versions of their own face and a stranger’s face. Affective traits modulated self-image and social comparisons of healthiness. Face health judgement was also related to physical symptom perception and self-esteem; high physical symptom reports were associated a less healthy self-image and high self-reported (but not implicit) self-esteem was associated with more favourable social comparisons of healthiness. Subject to further validation, our novel face health judgement task could have utility as a perceptual measure of well-being. We are currently investigating whether face health judgement is sensitive to laboratory manipulations of mood.
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TL;DR: This article argues for a broader exploration of emotion signals from sources beyond the face muscles that are more automatic and difficult to control and focuses on the perception of implicit sources such as gaze and tears and autonomic responses such as pupil-dilation, eyeblinks and blushing that are subtle yet visible to observers and because they can hardly be controlled or regulated by the sender, provide important “veridical” information.
Abstract: Humans are well adapted to quickly recognize and adequately respond to another’s emotions. Different theories propose that mimicry of emotional expressions (facial or otherwise) mechanistically underlies, or at least facilitates, these swift adaptive reactions. When people unconsciously mimic their interaction partner’s expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions’ emotions, which in turn influence the observer’s own emotional and empathic behavior. The majority of research has focused on facial actions as expressions of emotion. However, the fact that emotions are not just expressed by facial muscles alone is often still ignored in emotion perception research. In this article, I therefore argue for a broader exploration of emotion signals from sources beyond the face muscles that are more automatic and difficult to control. Specifically, I will focus on the perception of implicit sources such as gaze and tears and autonomic responses such as pupil-dilation, eyeblinks and blushing that are subtle yet visible to observers and because they can hardly be controlled or regulated by the sender, provide important “veridical” information. Recently, more research is emerging about the mimicry of these subtle affective signals including pupil-mimicry. I will here review this literature and suggest avenues for future research that will eventually lead to a better comprehension of how these signals help in making social judgments and understand each other’s emotions.
75 citations
Cites background from "Feeling bad and looking worse: nega..."
...Results show that participants high in negative affectivity judged themselves as equivalent to less healthy looking versions of their own face and a stranger’s face (Mirams et al., 2014)....
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TL;DR: It is argued that facial NMSCs may have more of a negative impact on quality of life in women than in men, and evidence that indoor tanning is associated with the development of NMSC is reviewed.
10 citations
Cites background from "Feeling bad and looking worse: nega..."
...assessment of facial appearance and negative affect in women that is either not present or much weaker in men (Mirams et al., 2014)....
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TL;DR: This article developed a method for identifying how worn or dirty a container needs to be before people become unwilling to reuse it and demonstrates how this paradigm can be used to investigate factors that might influence people's willingness to reuse that container.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the effects of fasting and snack on aesthetics judgements of the bodies and faces of conspecifics and of objects in a sample of female and male participants were investigated.
Abstract: Research evidence suggests that physiological state of hunger might affect preference for female body weight, such that hungrier, compared to satiate, men prefer heavier body weight and rate as more attractive heavier female figures. Here, we seek to extend these findings by comparing the effects of fasting and snack on aesthetics judgements of the bodies and faces of conspecifics and of objects in a sample of female and male participants.Forty-four participants (women: n = 21, mean age = 23.70 yrs ± 0.62) provided aesthetic liking judgments of round and slim human bodies, faces and objects, under at least 12 h of overnight fasting and immediately after having eaten a snack (i.e., bananas). An anthropometric measure of adiposity (i.e., Body Mass Index, BMI) was also collected from each observer.Overall, we found that participants' aesthetic judgements were higher for slim stimuli compared to round ones. However, after fasting, participants rated round stimuli as more attractive compared to when they had a snack. This hunger-based shift in ratings not only was apparent when stimuli depicted a human body or face, but also when they depicted an object, thus suggesting a general modification of observers' aesthetic preference related to hunger. Importantly, this effect was modulated by participants' BMI so that only participants with a high BMI provided higher aesthetic judgements for round stimuli after fasting than after a snack.Our results demonstrated that both the modification of the physiological state and the individual differences in adiposity level of the observers might affect the aesthetic appreciation of the external world.
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TL;DR: Two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) are developed and are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period.
Abstract: In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented.
34,482 citations
"Feeling bad and looking worse: nega..." refers background or methods in this paper
...First, participants completed a state version of the PANAS (indicating to what extent they felt each emotion ‘right now’)....
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...The PANAS has good construct validity and test-retest reliability and this version provides an indication of dispositional affectivity [4,10]....
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...Low positive affect and high negative affect are considered to be independent dimensions and distinguishing features of depression and anxiety, respectively [4]....
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...The PANAS consists of a list of ten positive and ten negative feelings and emotions (e.g., active, determined, excited, afraid, distressed, and irritable) and respondents were instructed to rate the extent to which they had felt each feeling/emotion during the past few weeks on a scale from one (very slightly or not at all) to five (extremely)....
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...In addition, females tend to report higher negative affect than men [4] and more physical symptoms [2,46]....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors pointed out that there is a strong functional tie between opinions and abilities in humans and that the ability evaluation of an individual can be expressed as a comparison of the performance of a particular ability with other abilities.
Abstract: Hypothesis I: There exists, in the human organism, a drive to evaluate his opinions and his abilities. While opinions and abilities may, at first glance, seem to be quite different things, there is a close functional tie between them. They act together in the manner in which they affect behavior. A person’s cognition (his opinions and beliefs) about the situation in which he exists and his appraisals of what he is capable of doing (his evaluation of his abilities) will together have bearing on his behavior. The holding of incorrect opinions and/or inaccurate appraisals of one’s abilities can be punishing or even fatal in many situations. It is necessary, before we proceed, to clarify the distinction between opinions and evaluations of abilities since at first glance it may seem that one’s evaluation of one’s own ability is an opinion about it. Abilities are of course manifested only through performance which is assumed to depend upon the particular ability. The clarity of the manifestation or performance can vary from instances where there is no clear ordering criterion of the ability to instances where the performance which reflects the ability can be clearly ordered. In the former case, the evaluation of the ability does function like other opinions which are not directly testable in “objective reality’. For example, a person’s evaluation of his ability to write poetry will depend to a large extent on the opinions which others have of his ability to write poetry. In cases where the criterion is unambiguous and can be clearly ordered, this furnishes an objective reality for the evaluation of one’s ability so that it depends less on the opinions of other persons and depends more on actual comparison of one’s performance with the performance of others. Thus, if a person evaluates his running ability, he will do so by comparing his time to run some distance with the times that other persons have taken. In the following pages, when we talk about evaluating an ability, we shall mean specifically the evaluation of that ability in situations where the performance is unambiguous and is known. Most situations in real life will, of course, present situations which are a mixture of opinion and ability evaluation. In a previous article (7) the author posited the existence of a drive to determine whether or not one’s opinions were “correct”. We are here stating that this same drive also produces behavior in people oriented toward obtaining an accurate appraisal of their abilities. The behavioral implication of the existence of such a drive is that we would expect to observe behaviour on the part of persons which enables them to ascertain whether or not their opinions are correct and also behavior which enables them accurately to evaluate their abilities. It is consequently
16,927 citations
"Feeling bad and looking worse: nega..." refers background in this paper
...The attractiveness of another person’s face has previously been found to moderate the effect of social comparison on self-image, that is, comparing oneself with a more attractive person has a negative impact on one’s self-image [31]....
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16,312 citations
Additional excerpts
...The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE)....
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...Next, participants completed self and stranger versions of the FHJ task, the self-esteem Implicit Association Test (IAT) [12], and state versions of the RSE and PHQ-15 (participants responded according to how they felt at the present moment)....
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...50% thresholds on the stranger face health judgement task were not correlated with trait or state positive affect (p= .30 and p= .17, respectively), but were correlated negatively with PHQ-15 scores (trait r=2.51, p= .001, and state, r=2.42, p= .01) and were correlated positively with state RSE scores (r= .40, p= .01)....
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...The RSE [37] is a widely used measure of self-esteem consisting of ten statements relating to feelings about the self such as, ‘‘I feel that I’m a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others’’ and, ‘‘I certainly feel useless at times’’....
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...50% thresholds were also correlated with scores on the PHQ-15, RSE and IAT....
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TL;DR: An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute when instructions oblige highly associated categories to share a response key, and performance is faster than when less associated categories share a key.
Abstract: An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect + pleasant) share a key. This performance difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3 experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs. insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs. Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects).
9,731 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: Wilson's (1967) review of the area of subjective well-being (SWB) advanced several conclusions regarding those who report high levels of "happiness". A number of his conclusions have been overturned: youth and modest aspirations no longer are seen as prerequisites of SWB.
Abstract: W. Wilson's (1967) review of the area of subjective well-being (SWB) advanced several conclusions regarding those who report high levels of "happiness". A number of his conclusions have been overturned: youth and modest aspirations no longer are seen as prerequisites of SWB. E. Diener's (1984) review placed greater emphasis on theories that stressed psychological factors. In the current article, the authors review current evidence for Wilson's conclusions and discuss modern theories of SWB that stress dispositional influences, adaptation, goals, and coping strategies. The next steps in the evolution of the field are to comprehend the interaction of psychological factors with life circumstances in producing SWB, to understand the causal pathways leading to happiness, understand the processes underlying adaptation to events, and develop theories that explain why certain variables differentially influence the different components of SWV (life satisfaction, pleasant affect, and unpleasant affect).
9,254 citations
"Feeling bad and looking worse: nega..." refers background in this paper
...Given the links between well-being, affectivity and subjective perceptions of health [5,8] we investigated, first, whether the enhancement effects characteristic of happy people are also evident when skin tone, rather than facial symmetry is manipulated....
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..., our sense, or perception of how we feel in general [8] and are also linked with more specific selfperceptions....
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