Social Motives and Emotional Feelings as Determinants of Facial Displays: The Case of Smiling

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to examine the relationship between social motives, emotional feelings, and smiling, with a view to demonstrating that smiling is determined by both factors but in different ways. To vary social motives, the authors manipulated two aspects of social context. Pairs of friends performed either the same or a different task in either the same or a different room, whereas a control group participated in the experiment alone. To vary emotional feelings, participants viewed each of two film clips that differed with respect to the intensity of positive emotional feelings they evoked. Dependent variables included facial activity, as measured by the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), self-reported emotional feelings, and measures of social motives. As predicted, both emotional feelings and social motives affected facial activity. The relevance of the results for theories of facial displays is discussed.