“When subjects posed expressions of fear, they had a subjectively larger visual field, faster eye movements during target localization and an increase in nasal volume and air velocity during inspiration.”

“When subjects posed expressions of fear, they had a subjectively larger visual field, faster eye movements during target localization and an increase in nasal volume and air velocity during inspiration,” observed researcher Dr Joshua M Susskind and colleagues from the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto in Canada. The opposite pattern was found for disgust. The study was supported by a Canada Research Chairs program and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant and published in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature Neuroscience.

Using computer-generated graphics, the researchers trained a group of undergraduate students to model a set of facial expressions and then tested their vision and the airflow through their nose. During the training, the participants were presented with facial examples from one of eight different individuals, four men and four women, displaying six different emotional expressions. They used pictures of faces showing anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. After the participants rated these faces to identify which type of expression was shown, they were then asked to perform the face themselves. For fear, they were asked to furrow the brow by contracting the muscles, widen the eyes and flare the nostrils. For neutral expressions, they were asked to relax their muscles.

In separate experiments, with up to 20 participants each time, the researchers checked their ability to perform various tasks and took some measurements. They checked the visual fields by assessing how well the participants could see objects at the periphery of their vision, and by tracking participants’ eye movements. The researchers also used a respiratory device with a mask attached to a computer to measure how well the participants could breathe through the nose and to record the volume of air inhaled each minute. They also used MRI scans to take images of the nasal passages and this allowed them to estimate the volume of air within the nose by counting the number of pixels contained in the image of the passages on the screen.

They repeated the same tests when the participants were asked to show disgust. This face type was closest to the opposite of fear, with narrowed eyes, raised lips and a narrow nose.

The researchers suggest that fear may enhance perception, whereas disgust tends to dampen it. These results provide support for the Darwinian theory that facial expressions are not tools for social communication, but may have originated as a means of changing our interaction with the sights and smells of the physical world.

I suggest that perhaps fear (as an emotion) may have developed as an evolutionary adaptation that tends to enhance life force by energizing the immune and perceptual systems whereas disgust, which is more of a judgment than an emotion and is therefore more a mental exercise than an emotional one, tends to decrease life force by dampening the immune and perceptual systems.

The logical conclusion to me – in evolutionary adaptation, true negative emotions may actually be good for you while negative judgment appears to be the opposite. How can you tell the difference? Surprisingly, it’s fairly easy to distinguish emotion from judgment – by the time it takes to develop. True emotions tend to be spontaneous whereas judgments tend to take more time to manifest in their expression. For example, the symptoms of fear (perspiration, change in breathing pattern, facial expressions, increased heart rate, muscular movement, etc.) come almost instantly to a person faced with the object of a phobia. On the other hand, a person faced with something they find disgusting, feces for example, might wince up at the sight or smell of it, but not instantly as they would if they were truly afraid of it instead.

Can you experience true emotion without judgment? We humans tie our mental so tightly with our emotional and physical aspects that it makes me wonder. Yet the startle response suggests to me that it is possible to experience emotion without judgment. And whenever I let go my judgment about something or someone, I tend to also release the emotions, too. And many times, I’ve confused emotion with judgment – such that in releasing one, I release the other – because in my mind I’ve made them one and the same.

What do you think?