Kunde, W. 1 , Lozo, L. 2 & Neumann, R. 3
1 Department of Psychology. University of Wuerzburg
2 Department of Psychology. University of Technologies Dortmund
3 Department of Psychology. University of Trier
Goal-oriented actions, by definition, aim at producing certain changes in the environment. Such actions have to be governed by codes of anticipatable action consequences. We explored whether actions that produce consequences in the social environment (such as facial expressions) are governed by anticipatory codes of social effects as well. In agreement with such a proposal, we found that the generation of facial expressions was harder when participants produced predictable facial feedback from a virtual counterpart that was incompatible with their own facial expression, such that e.g. smiling produced the presentation of a frowning face. Further experimentation confirmed that this expression-effect compatibility effect was due to the mimic content of the feedback rather than to more peripheral visual properties. These results comply with the assumption that the anticipation of social consequences of facial expressions plays a substantial role in the generation of these facial actions.