Asymmetry in Facial Emotional Expression.

A detailed Summary of Asymmetry in Facial Emotional Expression.

Asymmetry in Facial Emotional Expression.

Research in the past has demonstrated that the right hemisphere of the brain is dominant in the perception and expression of emotion. As a result of crossing of the nervous system, the expectation was that the left side of the face would express emotion more intensely than the right. This was tested by using left and right composite faces, showing them to participants, asking them to rate which of the two faces was more intense. The finding was that participants judges the left composites to be more emotionally intense than the right composites, thus supporting the hypothesis that there is asymmetry in the facial expression of emotion. This finding leads to the conclusion that the right hemisphere is dominant in the perception, expression and general procession of emotional information.

Crossing over of the nervous system occurs at the decussation of the pyramids , this is a site just above the medulla-spinal cord junction at which the nerve fibres from either side of the brain cross over to the contralateral side of the body (Marieb, 1998). This means that the sensory information from the right side of the body goes to the contralateral side of the brain, in this case t

The number of trials on which a single subject selected the LL composite as expressing emotion more intensely were tabulated as a score out of 16. This score was then converted to a proportion (varying from zero to one). Then an average was taken of all the different proportions, thus getting a mean of the amount of times the participants judged the LL composite to have more emotional intensity. For this experiment the mean was 0.546, with a standard deviation of 0.12 (both rounded to two decimal places). The 95% confidence interval has an upper bound of 0.53 and a lower bound of 0.55. This result for the confidence interval shows that 95% of the time, the percentage of faces being chosen being the LL composite will be between the values of 0.53 and 0.55. Thus the proportion of times the LL composite was chosen is greater than the chance level of 0.5.

These results show that the LL composites were judged to be more emotionally expressive than the RR composites. This suggests that the left side of the face expresses emotion more intensely than the right side of the face, thus supporting the hypothesis being tested. This hypothesis is in agreement with Sackheim and Gur's finding in 1978 that the left side of the face shows more emotion more intensely than the right side.

he left hemisphere, and vice versa. Due to this cross over, each hemisphere has motor control over the contralateral side of the body.

Darwin first proposed the importance of expression as a form of communication that had survival value for the human species (Atkinson, Atkinson, Smith, Bem, Nolen-Hoeksema, 1996). Lat

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