“Our Sense of Self” project for Social Psychology
Required Resources
Read/review the following resources for this activity:
· Textbook: Chapter 3
· Lesson
· Minimum of 3 scholarly sources (in addition to the textbook)
Instructions
This week we explored the topics of self-concept, self-esteem and self-presentation. Take some time to reflect on your own self-concept. Who are you? How do you define yourself? How do you feel about your abilities to be successful and accomplish your goals? What image of yourself do you currently, or do you wish to moving forward present to the world. Keep that introspective reflection in mind as you move through this assignment, considering how your own understanding of these ideas has evolved over the years to your present level of development.
Now, pretend that you have been asked to speak to a group of middle school students on the topic of bullying as it relates to self-concept, self-esteem and self-presentation. Create a PowerPoint presentation that addresses the following:
· Keeping in mind your audience of 12-14 year olds, define self-concept, self-esteem and self-presentation.
· Analyze and explain the possible causes of bullying in the context of these three concepts.
· Analyze and explain the impact of bullying (on the victim and aggressor) of these three concepts.
· Provide specific actions or behaviors kids in your audience can use to stop or respond positively when they see bullying, are bullied, or are tempted to bully.
As you complete your presentation, be sure to:
· Use speaker’s notes to expand upon the bullet point main ideas on your slides, making references to research and theory with citation.
· Proof your work
· Use visuals (pictures, video, narration, graphs, etc.) to compliment the text in your presentation and to reinforce your content.
· Do not just write a paper and copy chunks of it into each slide. Treat this as if you were going to give this presentation live to a group of middle school kids – be relevant, engaging, and focused.
Presentation Requirements (APA format)
· Length: 8-10 slides (not including title, introduction, and references slides)
· Font should not be smaller than size 16-point
· Parenthetical in-text citations included and formatted in APA style
· References slide (a minimum of 3 outside scholarly sources plus the textbook and/or the weekly lesson for each course outcome)
· Title and introduction slide required
Assignment: Our Sense of Self
Required Resources Read/review the following resources for this activity:
· Textbook: Chapter 3
· Lesson
· Minimum of 3 scholarly sources (in addition to the textbook)
Instructions This week we explored the topics of self-concept, self-esteem and self-presentation. Take some time to reflect on your own self-concept. Who are you? How do you define yourself? How do you feel about your abilities to be successful and accomplish your goals? What image of yourself do you currently, or do you wish to moving forward present to the world. Keep that introspective reflection in mind as you move through this assignment, considering how your own understanding of these ideas has evolved over the years to your present level of development.
Now, pretend that you have been asked to speak to a group of middle school students on the topic of bullying as it relates to self-concept, self-esteem and self-presentation. Create a PowerPoint presentation that addresses the following:
· Keeping in mind your audience of 12-14 year olds, define self-concept, self-esteem and self-presentation.
· Analyze and explain the possible causes of bullying in the context of these three concepts.
· Analyze and explain the impact of bullying (on the victim and aggressor) of these three concepts.
· Provide specific actions or behaviors kids in your audience can use to stop or respond positively when they see bullying, are bullied, or are tempted to bully.
As you complete your presentation, be sure to:
· Use speaker’s notes to expand upon the bullet point main ideas on your slides, making references to research and theory with citation.
· Proof your work
· Use visuals (pictures, video, narration, graphs, etc.) to compliment the text in your presentation and to reinforce your content.
· Do not just write a paper and copy chunks of it into each slide. Treat this as if you were going to give this presentation live to a group of middle school kids – be relevant, engaging, and focused.
Presentation Requirements (APA format)
· Length: 8-10 slides (not including title, introduction, and references slides)
· Font should not be smaller than size 16-point
· Parenthetical in-text citations included and formatted in APA style
· References slide (a minimum of 3 outside scholarly sources plus the textbook and/or the weekly lesson for each course outcome)
· Title and introduction slide required
Chapter 3 p54.
Can you imagine living a meaningful or coherent life without a clear sense of who you are? In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks (1985) described such a person—a patient named William Thompson. According to Sacks, Thompson suffered from an organic brain disorder that im- pairs a person’s memory of recent events. Unable to recall anything for more than a few seconds, Thompson was always disoriented and lacked a sense of inner continuity. The effect on his behavior was startling. Trying to grasp a constantly vanishing identity, Thompson would construct one tale after another to account for who he was, where he was, and what he was doing. From one moment to the next, he would improvise new identities—a grocery store clerk, a minister, or a medical patient, to name just a few. In social settings, Thompson’s behavior was especially intriguing. As Sacks (1985) observed,
The presence of others, other people, excite and rattle him, force him into an end- less, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and -seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the nonhuman order, making no social demands upon him, allow this identity-delirium to relax, to subside. (p. 110)
Thompson’s plight is unusual, but it highlights two important points— one about the private “inner” self, the other about the “outer” self we show to others. First, the capacity for self-reflection is necessary for people to feel as if they understand their own motives and emotions and the causes of their behavior. Unable to ponder his own actions, Thompson appeared vacant and without feeling—”desouled,” as Sacks put it. Second, the self is heavily influenced by
Putting Common SenSe to the Test
social factors. Thompson himself seemed compelled to put on a face for others and to improvise characters for the company he kept. We all do, to some extent. We may not create a kaleidoscope of multiple identities as Thompson did, but the way we manage ourselves is influenced by the people around us.
This chapter examines the ABCs of the self: A for affect, B for behavior, and C for cognition. First, we ask a cognitive question: How do people come to know themselves, develop a self-concept, and maintain a stable sense of identity? Second, we explore an affec- tive, or emotional, question: How do people evaluate themselves, enhance their self-images, and defend against threats to their self-esteem? Third, we confront a behavioral question: How do people regulate their own actions and present themselves to others accord- ing to interpersonal demands? As we’ll see, the self is a topic that has attracted unprecedented interest among social psychologists (Leary & Tangney, 2003; Sedikides & Spencer, 2007; Swann & Bosson, 2010; Vohs & Finkel, 2006).
The Self-Concept p55
Have you ever been at a noisy gathering—holding a drink in one hand and a spring roll in the other, struggling to have a conversation over music, vibrating phones, and the chatter of voices—and yet managed to hear someone at the other end of the room say your name? If so, then you have experienced the “cocktail party effect”—the tendency of people to pick a personally relevant stimulus, like a name, out of a complex and noisy environment (Cherry, 1953; Conway, Cowan, & Bunting, 2001). Even infants who are too young to walk or talk exhibit the ten- dency to respond to their own name (Newman, 2005). To the cognitive psycholo- gist, this phenomenon shows that human beings are selective in their attention. To the social psychologist, it also shows that the self is a brightly lit object of our own attention.
The term self-concept refers to the sum total of beliefs that people have about themselves. But what specifically does the self-concept consist of? Ac- cording to Hazel Markus (1977), the self-concept is made up of cognitive mole- cules she called self-schemas: beliefs about oneself that guide the processing of self-relevant information. Self-schemas are to an individual’s total self-concept what hypotheses are to a theory or what books are to a library. You can think of yourself as masculine or feminine, as independent or dependent, as liberal or conservative, as introverted or extroverted. Indeed, any specific attribute may have relevance to the self-concept for some people but not for others. The self- schema for body weight is a good example. Men and women who regard them-selves as overweight or underweight, or for whom body image is a conspicuous aspect of the self-concept, are considered schematic with respect to weight. For body-weight schematics, a wide range of otherwise mundane events—maybe a trip to the supermarket, the sight of a fashion model, dinner at a restaurant, a day at the beach, or watching a friend diet—may trigger thoughts about the self. In contrast, those who do not regard their own weight as extreme or as an important part of their lives are aschematic on that attribute (Markus et al., 1987).
It is important to realize that people are multifaceted and that our self-concept may consist of a multitude of self-schemas. As we will see shortly, people who identify with two cultures may have a “double consciousness” about who they are and hold different self-schemas that fit within each culture. African Americans, for example, have one self-schema that fits generally within mainstream American culture and another tied more specifically to African American culture (Brannon, Markus, & Taylor, 2015).
Rudiments of the Self-Concept
Clearly the self is a special object of our attention. Whether you are mentally focused on a memory, a tweet, a foul odor, the song in your head, your growl- ing stomach, or this sentence, consciousness is like a “spotlight.” It can shine on only one object at a point in time, but it can also shift rapidly from one object to another and process information outside of awareness. In this spotlight, the self is front and center. But is the self so special that it is uniquely represented in the neural circuitry of the brain? And is the self a uniquely human concept, or do other animals also distinguish the self from everything else?
Is the Self Specially Represented in the Brain? As illustrated by the story of William Thompson that opened this chapter, our sense of identity is biologically rooted. In The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux (2002) argues that the synaptic connections in the brain provide the biological base for memory, which makes possible the sense of continuity that is needed for a normal identity. In The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, developmental psychologist Bruce Hood (2012) notes that our sense of self emerges in childhood through our social interactions—and that it is a mere illusion, “a powerful deception generated by our brains for our own benefit.” In The Lost Self: Pathologies of the Brain and Identity, Todd Feinberg and Julian Keenan (2005) describe how the self can be transformed or completely destroyed by severe head injuries, brain tumors, diseases, and exposure to toxic substances that damage the brain and nervous system. Social neuroscientists have started to explore these possibilities. Using PET scans, fMRI, and other imaging techniques that capture the brain in ac- tion, these researchers are finding that certain areas become more active when laboratory participants see a picture of themselves rather than a picture of another person (Platek et al., 2008), when they viewed self-relevant words such as their own name or street address rather than other-relevant words (Moran et al., 2009), and when they take a first-person perspective while play- ing a video game as opposed to a third-person perspective (David et al., 2006). As we will see throughout this chapter, the self is a frame of reference that powerfully influences our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Not all aspects of the self are housed in a single structure of the brain. However, the bulk of research does seem to suggest that various self-based processes can be traced to activities occurring in certain areas (Qin, Duncan, & Northoff, 2013; Heatherton, 2011).
Do Nonhuman Animals Show Self-Recognition? When you stand in front of a mirror, you recognize the image as a reflection of yourself. But what about dogs, cats, and other animals—how can we possibly know what nonhumans think about mirrors? In a series of studies, Gordon Gallup (1977) placed different species of animals in a room with a large mirror. At first, they greeted their own images by vocalizing, gesturing, and making other social responses. After several days, only great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans)—but not other animals—seemed capable of self-recognition, using the mirror to pick food out of their teeth, groom themselves, blow bubbles, and make faces for their own entertainment. From all appearances, the apes recognized themselves.
In other studies, Gallup anesthetized the animals, then painted an odor- less red dye on their brows and returned them to the mirror. Upon seeing the red spot, only the apes spontaneously reached for their own brows—proof that they perceived the image as their own (Povinelli et al., 1997; Keenan et al., 2003). Among the apes, this form of self-recognition emerges in young ad- olescence and is stable across the life span, at least until old age (de Veer et al., 2003). By using a similar red dye test (without anesthetizing the infants), developmental psychologists have found that most humans begin to recognize themselves in the mirror between the ages of 18 and 24 months (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979).
Many researchers believe that self-recognition among great apes and human infants is the first clear expression of the concept “me.” Recent research suggests that certain intelligent non-primates can also recognize themselves. In one study, researchers at a New York aquarium found that two bottlenose dolphins marked with black ink often stopped to examine themselves in a mirror (Reiss & Marino, 2001). In a second study, researchers found that three Asian elephants placed in front of a jumbo-sized mirror used the mirror to inspect themselves—as when they moved their trunks to see the insides of their mouths, a part of the body they usually cannot see (Plotnik et al., 2006). In contrast, testing of thirty-four giant pandas of varying ages showed that they did not recognize their own images in the mirror (Ma et al., 2015).
It’s important not to assume from this research that the mirror test is a pure measure of self-recognition or that it emerges at the same age throughout the world. Tanya Broesch and others (2011) tested children between the ages of 33 and 72 months in a number of countries. In line with past research, 88% of American children and 77% of Canadian children “passed” the test. Yet elsewhere it was only 58% in Saint Lucia, 52% in Peru, and 51% in Grenada; only two children passed in Kenya and none did so in Fiji. Based on their observations, the re- searchers speculated that the children in these non-Western countries did not lack self-recognition. They knew it was their image in the mirror but—having been raised for compliance and trained not to ask questions—they did not dare touch or remove the mark. Whatever the interpretation, this cross-cultural research raises questions as to whether the mirror test can be used to measure the self-concept (Broesch et al., 2011).
What Makes the Self a Social Concept? The ability to see yourself as a dis- tinct entity in the world may be a necessary first step in the evolution and develop- ment of a self-concept. The second step involves social factors. Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1902) introduced the term looking-glass self to suggest that other people serve as a mirror in which we see ourselves. Expanding on this idea, George Herbert Mead (1934) added that we often come to know ourselves by imagining what significant others think of us and then incorporating these perceptions into our self-concepts.
Picking up where the classic sociologists left off, Susan Andersen and Serena Chen (2002) theorized that the self is “relational”—that we draw our sense of who we are from our past and current relationships with the significant others in our lives. It is interesting that when Gallup tested his apes, those that had been raised in isolation—without exposure to peers—did not recognize themselves in the mirror. Only after such exposure did they begin to show signs of self-recognition. Among human beings, our self-concepts match our perceptions of what others think of us. Illustrating our capacity for “meta-insight,” research also shows that people can distinguish between how they perceive themselves—for example, how smart, funny, or outgoing—and how others see them (Carlson et al., 2011). In fact, it seems that we can tell when our perceptions of what others think of us are more or less correct (Carlson & Furr, 2013).
In recent years, social psychologists have broken new ground in the effort to understand the social self. People are not born thinking of themselves as smart, lazy, reckless, likable, shy, or outgoing. So where do their self-concepts come from? In the coming pages, the following sources are considered: introspection, perceptions of our own behavior, other people, autobiographical memories, and the cultures in which we live.
Introspection
Let’s start at the beginning: How do people achieve insight into their own beliefs, attitudes, emotions, desires, personalities, and motivations? Although common sense makes this question seem ludicrous, many social psychologists have sought to answer the question of how, and how well, people gain self-knowledge (Vazire & Wilson, 2012).
Think about this: Don’t you know what you think because you think it? And don’t you know how you feel because you feel it? Look through popular books on how to achieve self-insight, and you’ll find the unambiguous answers to these questions to be yes. Whether the prescribed technique is yoga, meditation, psychotherapy, religion, dream analysis, or hypnosis, the advice is basically the same: Self-knowledge is derived from introspection, a looking inward at one’s own thoughts and feelings.
If the how-to books are correct, it stands to reason that no one can know you as well as you know yourself. Thus, people tend to assume that for others to know you at all, they would need information about your private thoughts, feelings, and other inner states—not just your behavior. But is this really the case? Most social psychologists are not sure that this faith in introspection is justified. Some forty years ago, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson (1977) conducted a series of experiments in which they found that research participants often could not accurately explain the causes or correlates of their own behavior. This observation forced researchers to confront a thorny question: Does introspection provide a direct pipeline to self-knowledge?
In Strangers to Ourselves, Wilson (2002) argued that it does not. In fact, he finds that introspection can sometimes lead us astray on the road to self-knowledge. In a series of studies, he found that the attitudes people reported having about different objects corresponded closely to their behavior toward those objects. The more participants said they enjoyed a task, the more time they spent on it; the more attractive they found a scenic landscape, the more pleasure was revealed in their facial expressions; the happier they said they were with a current dating partner, the longer the relationship with that partner ultimately lasted. Yet after participants were told to analyze the reasons for how they felt, the attitudes that they reported no longer corresponded to their behavior. There are two problems. The first, as described by Wilson, is that human beings are mentally busy processing information, which is why we so often fail to understand our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Apparently, it is possible to think too much and be too analytical, only to get confused.
In Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself, David Dunning (2005) points to a second type of problem in self- assessment: that people overestimate the posi- tives. Most people, most of the time, think they are better than average, even though it is statisti- cally impossible for this to happen. As we will see in our later discussion of self-enhancement, people from all walks of life tend to overrate their own skills, their prospects for success, the accuracy of their opinions, and the impressions they form of others—possibly with dire consequences for their health and well-being. We will also see, however, that many people have insight into their own positive—and sometimes negative—biases. In a study that demonstrates the point, Kathryn Bollich and others (2015) found that most people who harbor biased self-perceptions (for example, about how warm, dependable, stable, and funny they are relative to how they are rated by their own peers) accurately describe themselves as biased when prompted.
When it comes to self-insight, people do have difficulty projecting forward and predicting how they would feel in response to future emotional events—a pro- cess known as affective forecasting. Imagine that you have a favorite candidate in an upcoming political campaign. Can you anticipate how happy you would be one month after the election if this candidate were to win? How unhappy would you be if he or she were to lose? Closer to home, how happy would you be six months after winning a million-dollar lottery? Or how unhappy would you be if you were injured in an automobile accident?
In a series of studies, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert (2003) asked re- search participants to predict how they would feel after various positive and nega- tive life events and compared their predictions to how others experiencing those events said they actually felt. Consistently, they and others have found that people overestimate the strength and duration of their emotional reactions, a phenom- enon they call the impact bias (Wilson & Gilbert, 2013). In one study, junior pro- fessors predicted that receiving tenure would increase their happiness levels for several years, yet professors who actually received tenure were no happier several years later than those not granted tenure. In a second study, voters predicted they would be happier a month after an election if their candidate won than if he or she lost. In actuality, supporters of the winning and losing candidates did not differ in their happiness levels one month after the election.
There are two possible reasons for the impact bias in affective forecasting. First, when it comes to negative life events—such as an injury, illness, or big fi- nancial loss—people do not fully appreciate the extent to which our psychological coping mechanisms help us to cushion the blow. In the face of adversity, human beings can be remarkably resilient—and not as devastated as we fear we will be (Gilbert et al., 1998). In fact, people are even more likely to overlook the coping mechanisms that others use. The result is a self–other difference by which we tend to predict that others will suffer even longer than we will (Igou, 2008). A second reason for overestimates is that when we introspect about the emotional impact on us of a future event—say, the breakup of a close relationship—we become so focused on that single event that we neglect to take into account the effects of other life experiences. To become more accurate in our predictions, then, we need to force ourselves to think more broadly, about all the events that impact us. In one study, college students were asked to predict their emotional reactions to their school football team’s winning or losing an important game. As usual, they tended to overestimate how long it would take them to recover from the victory or defeat. This bias disappeared, however, when the students first completed a “prospec- tive diary” in which they estimated the amount of future time they will spend on everyday activities like going to class, talking to friends, studying, and eating meals (Wilson & Ross, 2000).
Self-Perception
Regardless of what we can learn from introspection, Daryl Bem (1972) proposed that people can learn about themselves the same way outside observers do—by watching their own behavior. Bem’s self-perception theory is simple yet pro- found. To the extent that internal states are weak or difficult to interpret, people infer what they think or how they feel by observing their own behavior and the situation in which that behavior takes place. Have you ever listened to yourself arguing with someone in an e-mail exchange, only to realize with amazement how angry you were? Have you ever devoured a sandwich in record time, only then to conclude that you must have been incredibly hungry? In each case, you made an inference about yourself by watching your own actions.
There are limits to self-perception, of course. According to Bem, people do not infer their own internal states from behavior that occurred in the presence of com- pelling situational pressures such as reward or punishment. If you argued vehe- mently or wolfed down a sandwich because you were paid to do so, you probably would not assume that you were angry or hungry. In other words, people learn about themselves through self-perception only when the situation alone seems insufficient to have caused their behavior.
Over the years, a good deal of research has supported self-perception theory. When people are gently coaxed into saying or doing something and when they are not otherwise certain about how they feel, they often come to view themselves in ways that are consistent with their public statements and behaviors (Chaiken & Baldwin, 1981; Kelly & Rodriguez, 2006; Schlenker & Trudeau, 1990). In one study, participants induced to describe themselves in flattering terms scored higher on a later test of self-esteem than did those who were led to describe themselves more modestly (Jones et al., 1981; Rhodewalt & Agustsdottir, 1986). In another study, people who were maneuvered by leading questions into describing themselves as introverted or extroverted—whether or not they really were—often came to define themselves as such later on (Fazio & Zanna, 1981; Swann & Ely, 1984). British author E. M. Forster long ago anticipated the theory when he asked, “How can I tell what I think ‘til I see what I say?”
Self-perception theory may have even more reach than Bem had anticipated. Bem argued that people sometimes learn about themselves by observing their own freely chosen behavior. But might you also infer something about yourself by observing the behavior of someone else with whom you completely identify? In a series of studies, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini (2007) demonstrated this phenomenon, which they call vicarious self-perception. In one experiment, for example, they asked college students to listen to an interview with a fellow stu- dent who had agreed afterward to spend a few extra minutes helping out on a project on homelessness. Before listening to the interview, all participants were fitted with an EEG recording device on their foreheads that allegedly measured brain activity as they viewed a series of images and words. By random assign- ment, some participants but not others were then told that their brain-wave pat- terns closely resembled that of the person whose interview they would soon hear—a level of resemblance, they were told, that signaled genetic similarity and relationship closeness. Would participants in this similarity feedback condition draw inferences about themselves by observing the behavior of a fellow student? Yes. In a post-interview questionnaire, these participants (compared to those in the no-feedback control group) rated themselves as more sensitive and as more self-sacrificing if the student whose helpfulness they observed was said to be similar, biologically. What’s more, when the session was over, 93% of those in the similarity condition agreed to spend some extra time themselves helping the experimenter— compared to only 61% in the no-feedback control group.
Introspection and self-perception theory make different predictions about the extent to which people can know themselves. If self-knowledge derives from pri- vate introspection, then clearly you know yourself better than anyone else can. If self-knowledge derives solely from observations of behavior, then it should be possible for others to know us as well as we know ourselves. Assuming that self-knowledge is gained from both sources, then the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But wait. Is it ever possible for others to know us better than we know ourselves?
Simine Vazire (2010) asked this very question and came up with a surprising answer. Vazire pro- posed a Self–Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) model in which she predicts that we know ourselves better than others do when it comes to traits that are “internal” and hard to observe (such as how opti- mistic, anxious, or easily upset a person is) and that there is no self-other difference when it comes to traits that are “external” and easy to observe (such as how quiet, sociable, or messy a person is). She also predicts that others may actually know us better than we know ourselves when it comes to observ- able traits that can be so touchy for self-esteem purposes that we have motivated “blind spots” (such as how smart, creative, or rude a person is). In these latter instances, Vazire predicts, others can be more objective than we are about ourselves. To test these predictions, Vazire asked college students to rate themselves—and then had their friends rate the participants—on a number of per- sonality traits. Three types of traits were studied: 1) high in observ ability (talkativeness, dominance, and leadership), (2) low in observability and not evaluative (self-esteem and anxiety), and (3) low in observability and highly evaluative (intelligent and creative). To determine accuracy, Vazire then mea- sured how participants fared on objective measures of these traits using various laboratory exercises and paper-and-pencil tests. The results provided strong support for the SOKA model. d Figure 3.1 shows that self- and friend-ratings were equally ac- curate for highly observable traits, that self-ratings were more accurate for internal non-evaluative traits, but that friend-ratings were more accurate for internal evaluative traits. Clearly, to know thyself requires a combination of information and objectivity (Vazire & Carlson, 2011).
Self-Perceptions of emotion Draw the corners of your mouth back and up and tense your eye muscles. Okay, relax. Now raise your eyebrows, open your eyes wide, and let your mouth drop open slightly. Relax. Now pull your brows down and to- gether and clench your teeth. Relax. If you followed these direc- tions, you would have appeared to others to be feeling first happy, then fearful, and finally angry. The question is, how would you have appeared to yourself?
Social psychologists who study emotion have asked precisely that question. Viewed within the framework of self-perception theory, the facial feedback hypothesis states that changes in facial expression can trigger corresponding changes in the sub- jective experience of emotion. In the first test of this hypoth- esis, James Laird (1974) told participants that they were taking part in an experiment on activity of the facial muscles. After attaching electrodes to their faces, he showed them a series of cartoons. Before each one, the participants were instructed to contract certain facial muscles in ways that created either a
smile or a frown. As Laird predicted, participants rated what they saw
As suggested by self-perception theory, we sometimes infer how we feel by observing our own behavior.
facial feedback hypothesis The hypothesis that changes in facial expression can lead to corresponding changes in emotion.
as funnier when they were smiling than when they were frowning. Suggesting that this effect is universal, researchers recently replicated these find- ings in Ghana, West Africa (Dzokoto et al., 2014).
In one particularly interesting field study that illustrates how our emotional state can be influenced by naturally occurring changes in facial expression, re- searchers from Italy stopped a random sample of men and women on a beach and asked them in a questionnaire to report on how angry and aggressive they were feeling. Some of the beach goers faced the bright sun while answering the ques- tion, causing “sun-induced frowning” on their faces. Others were questioned with their back to the sun or while wearing sunglasses. As predicted by the facial feed- back hypothesis, and even though participants themselves said that their mood was not affected by the sunlight, those who frowned at the sun reported higher levels of anger than all others (Marzoli et al., 2013).
It is clear that facial feedback can evoke and magnify certain emotional states. It’s important to note, however, that the face is not necessary to the subjective experience of emotion. When neuropsychologists recently tested a young woman who suffered from bilateral facial paralysis, they found that despite her inability to outwardly show emotion, she reported feeling various emotions in response to positive and negative visual images (Keillor et al., 2003). How does facial feedback work? With 80 muscles in the human face that can create over 7,000 expressions, can we actually vary our own emotions by contract- ing certain muscles and wearing different expressions? Research suggests that we can, though it is not clear what the results mean. Laird argues that facial expres- sions affect emotion through a process of self-perception: “If I’m smiling, I must be happy.” Consistent with this hypothesis, Chris Kleinke and others (1998) asked people to emulate either happy or angry facial expressions depicted in a series of photographs. Half the participants saw themselves in a mirror during the task; the others did not. Did these manipulations affect mood states? Yes. Compared
to participants in a no-expression control group, those who put on happy faces felt better, and those who put on angry faces felt worse. As predicted by self- perception theory, the differences were particularly pronounced among partici- pants who saw themselves in a mirror
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