Communicating Without the Face: Holistic Perception of Emotions of People With Facial Paralysis

Abstract

People with facial paralysis (FP) report social difficulties, but some attempt to compensate by increasing expressivity in their bodies and voices. We examined perceivers' emotion judgments of videos of people with FP to understand how they interpret the combination of an inexpressive face with an expressive body and voice. Results suggest that perceivers form less favorable impressions of people with severe FP, but compensatory expression is effective in improving impressions. Perceivers seemed to form holistic impressions when rating happiness and possibly sadness. Findings have implications for basic emotion research and social functioning interventions for people with FP.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We thank Michael Slepian for his comments on this article.

Notes

Note. Higher severity dampening scores indicate that perceivers rated targets with mild FP as having stronger emotions than targets with severe FP.

¹This is a surprising finding in light of the facial feedback hypothesis, which would suggest that people with severe FP might experience emotion less intensely. Follow-up work is needed to examine this hypothesis in people with FP. For the purposes of this study, these results present a robust test of our hypotheses because we predicted that participants would perceive the opposite: that people with severe FP are less emotional than people with mild FP.

Note. Numbers are mean differences (rows minus columns). SE range = .14–16.

*p < .05.

Note. Numbers are mean differences (rows minus columns). Higher severity dampening scores indicate that perceivers rated targets with mild FP as having stronger emotions than targets with severe FP. SE range = .10–12.

*p < .05.