Experiment Plan: officially starting!!

For the past few weeks I have did some insightful research about the universality of facial expressions, and is finally starting my experiment tomorrow Wednesday, March 18th 2014 

[EXPERIMENT PLAN]

[Research Question]

It is commonly assumed that different culture groups have different ways of looking at things and different ways of expressing personalities.

How does cultural difference affect facial expressions?

[Hypothesis]

The study of facial expression can be traced back to the 19^th century. In fact, it was the famous English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin who was the first recorded scientist of proposing the idea of ‘universal facial expressions”.  Although the principles of Darwin’s studies were never facial expressions and his way of determining his theory is not rigorous, his later research was developed by modern scientists focusing on the psychology aspect. They developed Darwin’s program from a diversity of emotions to basic emotions and evaluated some key assumptions:

All human beings regardless of their culture easily recognize the seven (plus or minus 2) facial expressions.

The candidates of the seven basic emotions are happiness, surprise, fear, anger, contempt, disgust and sadness. Of course, different psychologies contain different opinions of these basic emotions. Dr. Paul Ekman does not include contempt. Silvan Tomkins categorizes facial expressions into: interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror.

On the contrast, there are also other opinions that facial expressions are varied from cultural differences such as anthropologist Margaret Mead and George Boston. Depending on common judgment facial expressions should be the same as culture traditions and rules as they should be different.

[Work cited]

Russell, James A., and Fernández Dols José Miguel. "What Does Facial Expressions Mean?" The Psychology of Facial Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 1-17. Print.

Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen. Unmasking the Face; a Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Print.

Based on the two different sides of theories, I predict that:

The Six basic emotions of facial expressions (happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness) should be generally universal, but might slightly vary in intensity depending on the cultural differences.

In order to test my hypothesis, I am going to plan an experiment on the recognitions (decoding) of distinct facial expressions.

[Variables]

Independent Variables: Culture/Nationality

Dependent Variable: the recognition of the emotion

[Constants]

Grade

Gender

[Procedures]

The two emotions I chose are fear and surprise.

1.      Prepare several facial pictures with either the emotion of fear and surprise

2.      Show the subjects of the pictures randomly and let them recognize the emotion.