Why the Same Expression May Not Mean the Same When Shown on Different Faces or Seen by Different People

This somewhat sexist quote by Oscar Wilde points nonetheless to two important issues about faces. First, faces seem to tell us about who the other person is, and second, we may be misled by them. The present chapter has the goal to present some findings about the importance of faces in the context of emotion communication. Most research on emotion considers the face as if it were a blank canvas with no meaning of its own. However, as we show, faces convey information relevant to the interpretation of emotion expressions and they have a meaning of their own which interacts with the facial expression shown.

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