Facial displays are not fixed, semantic read-outs of internal states such as emotions or intentions, but flexible tools for social influence. Facial displays are not about us, but about changing the behavior of those around us

Facial Displays Are Tools for Social Influence. Carlos Crivelli, Alan J. Fridlund. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.02.006

Highlights

.  Like non-human animal signals, human facial displays are an important way that we regulate our social interactions, whether they are in public or in private, and whether our ‘interactants’ are real or fantasied people, non-human animals, virtual agents, or even inanimate objects toward which we attribute agency.

.  Facial displays are not fixed, semantic read-outs of internal states such as emotions or intentions, but flexible tools for social influence. Facial displays are not about us, but about changing the behavior of those around us.

.  The behavioral ecology view of facial displays (BECV) is an externalist and functionalist approach to facial behavior that reconceives it as signaling contingent social action.

Abstract: Based on modern theories of signal evolution and animal communication, the behavioral ecology view of facial displays (BECV) reconceives our ‘facial expressions of emotion’ as social tools that serve as lead signs to contingent action in social negotiation. BECV offers an externalist, functionalist view of facial displays that is not bound to Western conceptions about either expressions or emotions. It easily accommodates recent findings of diversity in facial displays, their public context-dependency, and the curious but common occurrence of solitary facial behavior. Finally, BECV restores continuity of human facial behavior research with modern functional accounts of non-human communication, and provides a non-mentalistic account of facial displays well-suited to new developments in artificial intelligence and social robotics.

Keywords: behavioral ecology; facial displays; social influence; diversity; emotion; evolution