Research published in the journal Emotion found that specific head positions can influence how people appraise emotions from another person. People were reported as angrier when their head was tilted slightly down. This was because tilting down gave the impression of V-shaped eyebrows that emphasized an angry expression.
“One implication of these results is that assessing only facial muscle movements when examining facial expressions of emotion may not adequately capture the emotional message that is actually conveyed by that face, unless the head is also considered,” wrote the authors of the study.
The researchers conducted a series of studies where participants guessed a person’s facial expression based on their head position. The results showed people viewed intense expressions in anger when a person tilted their head down. As a result, a downward head tilt weakened other emotions such as surprise, disgust, fear and happiness. To understand why this happens, the researchers looked at how much influence eyebrows have in giving the illusion of anger.
When looking at pictures of people with their head tilted down, participants judged those with V-shaped eyebrows as very angry. However, when there was no indication of V-shaped eyebrows, this decreased the perception of anger. In a separate behavioral experiment, the researchers also found people were spontaneously more likely to display this head and facial movement when they were angry.
Several limitations exist including the focus on only one head position. The authors note that previous research has found different head positions, like when person shakes their head no, decreases the perception of anger but increases the perception of fear. Another limitation was the lack of diversity between people performing the downward head positions. Ethnic and gender bias was looked at, but the researchers mention it is a possibility to consider in future research.
An alternative interpretation to the results was people mistaking anger for dominance. “Prior work has shown that the combination of a downward head tilt and a neutral facial expression is strongly perceived as conveying dominance; future work is needed to determine whether the images examined here, featuring an anger expression and a downward head tilt, elicit even stronger dominance perceptions or whether the distinct-emotion signal conveyed by the anger facial expression dilutes any other antisocial message.”
The study, “How and why head position changes the perception of facial expressions of emotion”, was authored by Zachary Witkower and Jessica L. Tracy.
(Image by Peter Ziegler from Pixabay)