Coherence Between Emotions and Facial Expressions

The phrase “facial expression of emotion” contains the implicit assumption that facial expressions co-occur with, and are a consequence of, experienced emotions. Is this assumption true, or more precisely, to what degree is it true? In other words, what is the degree of statistical covariation, or coherence, between emotions and facial expressions? In this chapter, we review empirical evidence from laboratory and field studies that speaks to this question, summarizing studies results concerning expressions of emotions frequently considered as “basic”: happiness-amusement, surprise, disgust, sadness, anger and fear. We provide general and separate emotion mean correlations and proportions as coherence estimates as using meta-analytic methods.