Emotional expression is an integral aspect of human behaviour. An individual’s ability to express their subjective experience is necessary in the communication of society. Whilst there are automatic, universal expressions that accompany particular emotions (Darwin, 1872), people are also able to intentionally produce responses that represent a deliberate masking of their internal experience. This voluntary dissimulation of emotional expressions in psychological research will be of primary focus, with few previous studies trying to investigate this pertinent concept in a direct way.
This act of mediating and consciously masking emotional experiences is known as a display rule. They are the informal cultural conventions that guide and determine…show more content… Children of ages 6, 8 and 10 were told a series of descriptive stories that were used to elicit responses through interpersonal conflict. These participants were asked to choose the protagonist’s corresponding response through photographs of four facial expressions. Results indicated that 6-8-year-old children would utilise display rules approximately 25% of the time, whilst 10-year-olds indicated use about 50% of the time. This leads to support the theory that display rules develop with age. Gnepp and Hess (1986) follow a similar procedure in discerning the use of display rules to mask emotions in a given situation. Using a broader range of eight story themes, four were designed to elicit display rules of a prosocial nature and the others of a self-protective nature. Further, each of these eight stories themes were written into different versions: an alone, audience, and a prompted audience version. Each intended to evoke a different response, with its outcome dependent on the child’s understanding of display rules. Children from grade 1, 3, 5 and 10 at school were examined as hypothesised years of particular significance in maturity. This study concluded that there is a tendency for greater overt expressive behaviour in the domains of speech, as children understand verbal better than facial display rules, across all ages. Contrary to Saarni’s hypothesis, Gnepp and Hess (1986) found that there is a greater use of display rules for prosocial behaviour than self-protective. Moreover, this finding was generalised to be a result of social experience and exposure, as prosocial behaviour is taught more frequently and learnt first. These results should be reviewed with caution however, as there are more social demand characteristics reinforcing prosocial behaviour and is more powerfully
