Emotions - Day 6: Today I want to explore the emotion of Surprise/Surprised and what it looks like on the face of both Men and Women. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Surprise is another of Eckman's six basic types of human emotions. It is usually quite brief and characterized by a physiological startle response following something unexpected. This type of emotion can be positive, negative, or neutral. An unpleasant surprise, for example, might involve someone jumping out from behind a tree and scaring you as you walk to your car at night. An example of a pleasant surprise would be arriving home to find that your closest friends have gathered to celebrate your birthday. Surprise is often characterized by: Facial expressions: such as raising the brows, widening the eyes, and opening the mouth Physical responses: such as jumping back Verbal reactions: such as yelling, screaming, or gasping Surprise is another type of emotion that can trigger the fight or flight response. When startled, people may experience a burst of adrenaline that helps prepare the body to either fight or flee.9 Surprise can have important effects on human behavior. For example, research has shown that people tend to disproportionately notice surprising events. This is why surprising and unusual events in the news tend to stand out in memory more than others. Research has also found that people tend to be more swayed by surprising arguments and learn more from surprising information. ------------------------------------------------------------------- This emotion is one I particularly enjoy. I enjoy surprises and I enjoy surprising people and seeing their reactions. Some people do not enjoy surprises or being surprised at all as it causes the amygdala to initiate the flight/flight/freeze response strongly which some do not enjoy. What I find interesting when looking at the faces of both the men and woman expressing surprise is that despite the facial reactions being somewhat similar to each other in some of the faces you also see what appears to be the beginning of perhaps crying starting or the eyes welling up with tears. For example: Men: bottom right does indicate that there are tears coming on, whether they are tears of joy from the surprise or tears of terror, I'm not sure Women: Top right feels like tears of sadness at the surprise while bottom right may be tears of joy? All I know is that despite the facial expressions in either subject in any of the 6 basic emotions, the eyes can tell you a lot more about how the person is expressing a certain emotion. I have really enjoyed doing this series and the creation of these generated images for the whole series. Tomorrow I will tying thing up and closing out the series with a "brief" discussion about others emotions