ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Emotion Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1546418
The Portrait of Dorian Gray: Spontaneous Expression of Happiness is an Invariant Kinematic Marker
Provisionally accepted
- Department of General Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Crucial changes in the dynamical development of a facial display can characterize and distinguish spontaneous and posed facial expressions, a topic that has been poorly investigated. To assess spontaneous expressions of happiness, we presented video clips extracted from comedies showing hilarious scenes (Emotional Induction, Experiment 1) or videoclips showing smiling faces (Motor Contagion, Experiment 2). To induce posed expressions, we adopted the classic image of posed happiness from Ekman's dataset. The results showed high consistency for spontaneous expressions of happiness, characterised by reduced amplitude, speed and deceleration peaks of the smile and lower eyebrow distance compared to posed expressions, for both methods of emotion induction. Overall, we demonstrated that high-definition 3-D kinematics of dynamic facial movements together with FACS coding can provide relevant details to characterise the syntax of dynamic facial displays, showing that spontaneous expression of happiness is an individual fingerprint, unaltered by mood induction procedures. However, spontaneous smiling varied at the individual level, influenced by participants' predisposition to cognitively empathize with the movie protagonist. These findings are significant for emotion research, which has largely overlooked the impact of mood induction methods and their relationship with interindividual variability.
Keywords: Emotion expressions, kinematics, happiness, Emotional induction, motor contagion
Received: 16 Dec 2024; Accepted: 05 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Straulino, Scarpazza, Miolla, Spoto, Betti and Sartori. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Elisa Straulino, Department of General Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Luisa Sartori, Department of General Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.