The judgment of emotions from facial expressions.

Y interest in the question of the judgment of emotions from facial expressions, and of the validity of first impressions led me to arrange an experiment in the Harvard Psychological laboratory whereby the ability to read emotional expressions could be tested.Among other data, certain facts concerning the nature of emotions, their relation to each other, and the various forms and degrees of difficulty of interpretation were obtained, and have seemed of sufficient general interest to be described here.The ideal method would have been to judge actual facial expressions under emotional strain, but that was obviously impossible in the laboratory.A cinematograph, would have been almost as good and more practical, but not having such an instrument, I had to resort to pictures.From Rudolph's "Der Ausdruck des Menschen," which contains 680 pictures, I selected 105 of the best.These pictures were sketched from photographs of a skillful actor who posed for that purpose.The pictures were shown to two subjects at a time, there being in all four men and two women.They were asked to write down their interpretations of the emotions portrayed.About thirty judgments were made at one time.After the entire number had been gone through, the pictures were shown a second time, but not in the same order.The subjects were again asked to write down their judgments.This was to discover the degree of constancy.They were then told the judgments of all of the subjects, and also the book titles of the pictures.This was to discover if they would recognize their own judgments, and also if they would select the book title.They were then told the book title, and asked if they preferred that title to the judgment they had made.In this way the accuracy of portrayal by the artist could be ascertained.It may be stated here that the subjects were fairly consistent, that they did not very frequently