Special Issue Article

Which Cheek to Turn? The Effect of Gender and Emotional Expressivity on Posing Behavior

Public performance is a reported source of anxiety. While the relationship between emotion and postural laterality is well-known in animals, few studies have tested the possible link between audience effect, anxiety and head orientation in humans. The Valence-Specific Hypothesis posits that the left/right sides of the brain are specialized for processing positive/negative emotions respectively. Here, actors performed a piece in the presence of small, medium and large audiences. They self-reported feeling more anxious when the audience was large (also confirmed with speech analyses), but the small audience was scored with the lowest preference. We also found that the large audience was associated with the fewest orientations facing the public. Moreover, both large and small audiences were associated with more left-side than right side orientations. Here, actors’ emotions influenced lateralized positioning, with a tendency to use the left visual field (i.e. right hemisphere) in more anxious and less preferred situations, supporting the Valence-Specific hypothesis.

Though superficially symmetrical, the human face expresses emotion asymmetrically. Darwin (1872) first noted this phenomenon, conceding to being at a loss to explain why expressions such as smiling and sneering defiance were predominantly one-sided. Emotion lateralization offers a plausible account. Because the lower two-thirds of the face is contralaterally controlled, the emotion-dominant right hemisphere innervates the lower left hemiface, resulting in more intense expressions. Thus whether smiling or sneering, humans show stronger emotion on the left side of the face. This chapter reviews research examining asymmetries in the expression of facial emotion in humans, commencing with discussion of the right hemisphere's dominance for emotion processing. The right hemisphere's emotion-processing superiority results in hemifacial asymmetries in expressivity: the left hemiface is anatomically more expressive, moving more and earlier than the right hemiface. Not surprisingly then, viewers are sensitive to the left cheek's greater physiognomic expressivity, perceiving the left hemiface as more expressive than the right, even when digitally reversed. Critically, human behavior implies an intuitive awareness that the left cheek is more emotionally expressive, influencing behaviors including cradling infants and posing for photographs. Thus despite the absence of conscious awareness, when conveying emotion we intuitively favor the more expressive left cheek.