Facial expression, a gateway to affective semiotics

Announcing a webinar on Facial expression, a gateway to affective semiotics by Marc Mehu, Department of Psychology, Webster Vienna Private University.

Sunday January 19, 2025, at 04:00 PM GMT (UTC +0)

In communication, the access to a person’s face is priceless. Not only the face is the center of important sensory organs, but it is also a hub for the production of multimodal signals. Scholars have long recognized that understanding multimodal signals is key to the study of social cognition, as the sheer diversity of social signals likely results from evolutionary pressure imposed by the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in the management of our social environment. This diversity of signals is evident in the face alone. With over forty action units, facial behavior is responsible for a large portion of the visual signals we display on a regular basis. Facial signals have deep connections to sub-cortical brain areas and are thereby under the influence of instinctive, push factors. Facial signals are also under the control of voluntary processes and can be used strategically to manage social impressions and to sway listeners’ opinions. In this webinar, I will argue that the essential role played by facial expression in communication is that they allow signalers to quickly adapt to the volatility of social interactions. Facial behavior achieves this feat by forming flexible associations with speech. Facial behavior is indeed active at different levels of communication (ranging from emotional to emotive, and to symbolic) depending on the level of voluntary control signalers exert on facial displays. I will present observational and experimental evidence showing that facial expression covaries with speech acts but also interacts with the propositional content of speech to produce socially adaptive consequences. These results will be discussed within the framework of evolutionary theory in relation to neurobiological evidence for an increasing voluntary control over facial movements in primates. I also wish to cast a different light on the study of emotional expression by reframing this process into a strategically managed production of graded multimodal signals, which ultimate goals are to interact both with low-level affective processes and with the meaning making structures of our mind.

Moderator:

Monica Rector (Rio de Janeiro)

Panel:

Alan Crawley (Santa Barbara, California)

Devon Schiller (Vienna)

Federico Bellentani  (Torino)

Cristina Voto (Milano)

Piotr Sadowski (Dublin)

Remo Gramigna (Torino)

Bio:

Marc Méhu studied Psychology at the University of Liège (Belgium) with specializations in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Ethology. After two ethological field studies on non-human primate behavior in South India and West Africa (Republic of Guinea), he completed a PhD in Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Ecology at the University of Liverpool in 2007. Méhu’s doctoral thesis investigated the function of smiling and laughter in social interactions. Marc Méhu spent several months as a visiting researcher at the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute for Urban Ethology, hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna. He then moved to the University of Geneva for a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. Currently, Marc Méhu is Associate Professor of Psychology at Webster Vienna Private University. His research investigates the social function of nonverbal behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. He uses various research methods (from behavioural observations in the field to laboratory experiments) to better understand the production mechanisms and social function of facial expression. More recently, Marc Méhu turned his research interest towards understanding the complex interactions between facial expression and human language.