Will the real relationship between facial expression and affective experience please stand up: The case of exhilaration

Abstract

It is hypothesised that the empirical correlation between facial expression and affective experience varies as a function of the correlational design used to compute the coefficients. Predictions about the rank order of five designs were derived based on two assumptions. Female subjects were placed into one of three alcohol conditions (no ethanol, low dose, high dose) and were exposed to 30 slides containing jokes or cartoons. The degree of rated funniness and overt behaviour were intercorrelated using five different designs to analyse the same set of data. The results show that within-subject analyses yielded higher coefficients than between-subjects analyses. Aggregation of data increased the coefficients for within-subject analyses, but not for between-subject analyses. A cheerful mood was associated with hyper-expressiveness, i.e. the occurrence of smiling and laughter at relatively low levels of perceived funniness. It was demonstrated that low correlations between facial expression and affective experience may be based on several method artefacts.