Psychology 110 Final Report

Shavette M

Facial expressions are something that most people seldom think about. We smile when we are happy and frown when we are not. Right? Well there is actually a lot more to facial expressions. Plenty of questions that we can ask ourselves. Can you tell when your mom is mad without her even saying a word? You probably can. But could you tell if a stranger was mad? A little harder huh? What about a stranger from china? Getting hard? Are some people better at determining facial expressions then others? Are men better than women or is one race better than another? Those are some of the questions that I asked myself when deciding to do this project but I did narrow it down. In my research project I decided to find out which sex was better at determining facial expressions and if race played any factor in that.

My hypothesis was actually pretty simple. I thought that men and women can both determine facial expressions equally. I felt that one sex could not be better and that facial expressions are a kind of universal language. I also felt that race would have no part in reading facial expressions. I thought that no matter what race you are we are all part of the human race and that is all that mattered. The first thing I set out to do was to try and prove my findings.

I read the chapter on emotions in my book Psychology, by David G. Myers, and took part in a little mini version of my project. In the book they had six pictures of people making different facial expressions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust). The people pictured were a diverse group, three men and three women and of different ethnicities. I quickly matched the right expression with the right face. I then

asked my mom and dad to do the same and they easily got them all right too. Right away I started to think that my project would prove my hypothesis, that expressions are a universal language. Other parts in the book made since to me too, they had babies making different facial expressions and those were easy to tell also. It seems like facial expressions is the first "language" that we learn. I decided then to go right into my project and see what happens.

I took eight pictures of two different people making eight different facial expressions. One of my subjects was a white female and the other was an African American male. The eight expressions I had them make were: sadness, anger, joy, fear, doubt, disdain, amusement and reverence. One day when I was at a barbecue I realized I was at the perfect place to test my project. I gathered six different people together (3 females and 3 males, 3 whites and 3 blacks) and by themselves I laid out all eight pictures (in random order) and had them right which number they felt went with the right expression (all the pictures were numbered).

Table 1

Table 2

When I started going through my data and seeing which people got what emotions right I was pleasantly surprised. In terms of men vs. women both the men and the women scored good scores when judging the same sex. The women got all the correct for the woman while the men missed one when judging the guy. When it came to the girls judging the guys two of the females got the same picture wrong of the guy and when the guys judged the girl they got all the scores correct. Now this really confused me because all of the pictures that were wrong were all the same picture of the black guy and the people who got the picture wrong were white. Now through my project we see that

gender does not dramatically affect determining facial expressions but does my study prove that race does? How come the three white people all misidentified the expression of the black guy? I wouldn't necessarily say that race has an affect because we have to think about contributing factors. Take this for instance, all of the people who misidentified the black guy all misidentified the same picture. Maybe the picture was just bad or maybe he just made a weird expression. But then why didn't the black people get that same picture wrong? Lucky guess? It's hard to tell but I find it very odd that the same picture was the cause for confusion. Even so it was still one picture and all the rest were correct, for everybody. So I think it is safe to say that my original hypothesis is true (at least by my project). Gender and race do not effect determining facial expressions.

For the next time I would like to do the project several times with several different groups of people. Even though my hypothesis came out to be true I'm still a little annoyed with that one picture. Part of me wants to do it again so my mind can rest I can know for sure. Doing this made me think about a universal language. Reading facial expressions is a way that we as people can identify with one another and understand each other. If I was lost in a foreign city and didn't know the language a local would be able to look at me and tell if I was scared, happy, sad or whatever. It's pretty interesting. The material presented in the book was also very interesting and made the project a little more fun to learn.