Reading Bodily Postures And Facial Expressions Incorrectly Can Be Disastrous –
Just Ask Violent Offenders
Christopher Philip
Dutch researchers Kret and Gelder found that violent offenders commonly express difficulty discerning the difference between not only facial expressions, but also bodily expressions.
Over the course of four separate experiments, the researchers exposed 29 imprisoned aggressive male offenders with images depicting expressions of happiness, fear and anger, coupled with congruent and incongruent bodies.
In the first task, a control group of men as well as violent offenders were shown 72 images depicting anger, fear, happiness and sadness postures with the face blurred.
The results showed that a distracting angry posture, that is when the postures were shown alongside an angry body posture, it biased both the control group and the violent offenders into misreading the postures as angry. Thus, men generally, and not just violent offenders, are biased toward angry postures. This shows that angry postures, as previously measured in other studies, is particularly salient.
In the second task, two-second video clips depicting angry, fearful and happy bodily expressions, previously recognized at rate above 90% were shown to a control group and to the violent offenders.
This time, it was found that the violent offenders also read fearful body movements as expressing anger and they did so significantly more often than the control group.
In the third task, subjects were asked to categorize facial expressions and ignore the simultaneously presented congruent (matching) or incongruent (mismatched) postures. It was found that the violent offenders performed worse than the control group. This was especially the case when a smile was paired with an aggressive posture.
In the fourth task, subjects were shown 8 happy and angry postures consisting of angry (fight), happy (party) and neutral (sports). Emotionally congruent or incongruent postures were placed in the scenes. The participants were told to categorize the body emotion while ignoring the scene and focus on the main figure only.
Results showed that violent offenders could not recognize happy body expressions when a fight was presented simultaneously. However, the researchers note that the control group, the normal men, also found it difficult to ignore the fight presented alongside the image. Thus, there may be a gender effect such that men see angry postures and angry faces more readily than women, and are therefore biased to interpret them as violent.
Discussing The Findings
As shown here, particularly violent men and to a certain degree, men in general, are biased toward reading aggressive emotions.
Previous research has shown that men and women tend to be biased in reading aggressive, threatening, or angry body language especially if the emotions are incongruent with the body.
Bodily expressions of anger are a more direct physical threat as compared to facial expressions making them more important to diagnose quickly and possibly, to a lesser extent, accurately. It is possible that evolution simply favoured the perception of threat as a default condition. In other words, when in doubt, read the expression as anger, and not fear, or something else. This anger bias may have served our ancestors well and the assumption that a person is angry over some other condition, could result in a quick defensive strategy or a preventative aggressive attack to thwart any and all perceived threats.
However, in a stable environment, the bias can be counterproductive. It may lead to additional and unwarranted conflict that could have easily been avoided.
The researchers point out that while the violent offenders used the violent context to judge a happy face as angry, it could be that the happy face within a violent context is actually a ‘challenge face.’ Therefore the violent offenders may not exactly be mistaken by the happiness cue, but rather, using different information than the control group.
“When people have firsthand experience with fights, a smiling person with an aggressive posture may be extra threatening because it may signal confidence and dominance or a laugh in the face,” say the researchers.
Additionally, as other studies have shown, emotional expressions tend to be read most accurately when the face and body are congruent rather than incongruent. Also, context matters, as when the context did not match the scene, it tended to lead the participants astray.
Summarizing The Findings
When aggressive body language contrasts a smiling face, or where a happy bodily expression is out of place in an aggressive context, violent offenders’ judgment is influences more than normal men by the presence of threat signals.
When distracting images of an aggressive male posture was added both the control group and the violent offenders were impaired in matching postures.
Violent offenders often misjudged fearful body movements as aggressive more so than the control group.
When a happy face was presented with an aggressive posture, violent offenders did not properly identify it as happy.
Finally, violent offenders and the control group both suffered when a happy posture was viewed against a violent backdrop.
This suggests that both normal men and violent offenders are biased toward angry postures. However, the results showed that violent offenders are particularly sensitive to angry postures and tend to be biased in reading alternative expressions as anger.
In other words, when there is even a hint of anger present, or the context warrants anger, a violent offender is more likely to jump to misread the nonverbal signals leading to an inaccurate conclusion. This could result in potentially disastrous consequences.
As the violent offenders group was selected explicitly for their tendency to exact violence on other men, the results don’t come as a big surprise. “It is well known that a large percentage of violent offenders grew up in a violent environment — In such environments, it may have been adaptive to attend to contextual cues and quickly respond and perhaps over-react to cues of threat or misjudge expressions as threatening (better safe than sorry),” say the researchers.
Parting Conclusions
The researchers admit that they can not say for certain how or why there is a bias towards threatening body language. However, the importance of the study is that such a bias is known lending itself to therapeutic intervention.
For the layman, the results show that we should be particularly sensitive to our actions around the violent as even a happy expression in the wrong context, may set someone to aggression. Also, we know that men are prone to read expressions as violent, even if they may not be so, thus one should be clear about intensions lest they lead to conflict.
Certainly, understanding the propensity of expressions to be misread as violent indicates that one should be careful in certain aggressive context such as nightclubs which are often the hub for male dominance displays in courtship which are also often fraught with fist fights. One must wonders how many could be avoided.
Image Credit: John O’Nolan
Resources
Kret, M. E. and B. de Gelder. When a Smile Becomes a Fist: The Perception of Facial and Bodily Expressions of Emotion in Violent Offenders. Exp Brain Res. 2019. 228: 399-410. DOI 10.1007/s00221-013-3557-6.