Varieties of Emotional Experience during Voluntary Emotional Facial Expressions

Emotion theorists have argued that emotions are patterns of responses that imply coherence between behavioral, physiological, and phenomenological systems,1 including coherence between physiology and emotional expression2 and the modulation of emotional expression and subjective ex-perience by trait physiological dispositions.3 A physiological measure sen-sitive to emotion—frontal EEG asymmetry—has been hypothesized to reflect approach and withdrawal propensities,4 with relatively greater left frontal activity indexing a propensity for approach-related behavior, and rel-atively less left frontal activity indexing a propensity for withdrawal-related behavior. By this scheme, disgust, fear, and sadness—all thought to be with-drawal-related emotions—should show relatively less left frontal activity; while the putative approach-related emotions of anger and joy should show relatively greater left frontal activity.5 Using voluntary posed emotional facial expressions depicting anger, dis-gust, fear, joy and sadness, this study examined: (1) the coherence between physiological change and subjective reports of emotional experience, and (2) the modulation of subjective reports of emotional experience by resting phys-iology. The modulation hypothesis states that individuals with relatively greater left frontal activity at rest will be more likely to report approach emo-tions during this task and less likely to report withdrawal emotions during this task. This hypothesis states that trait levels of CNS activity will be related to