Is there a right way to express emotions?

Published on Psychology Today

In 2007, Amanda Knox—a 20-year-old college student—moved to Italy to study abroad. Only a few months into living there, Amanda came home to her flat (which she shared with 3 other women) to find bloodstains in the bathroom and her roommate’s bedroom door mysteriously locked. After calling the police, Amanda’s roommate was found murdered. When the police interviewed Amanda about what happened that night, Amanda’s response was not as emotional as they expected, which made them suspicious that Amanda might be the murderer. She was arrested shortly after, convicted, and sentenced to 26 years in prison.

The more recent case involving Karen Reed is similar. In 2022, Karen was out with her boyfriend and a group of friends at a bar. A number of questionable events happened after, but it ended with Karen going home alone and finding her boyfriend dead in the snow at his friend’s house the next morning. She acted strangely in response to her boyfriend’s death and was arrested soon after, the police claiming that Karen hit her boyfriend with the car and left him to die in the snow. However, there isn’t a lot of evidence that she is actually guilty of this crime, and her first trial ended in a mistrial.

What do these women have in common? They are both accused of murdering someone they knew, and for both, there are a lot of people who were convinced of their guilt. But the one thing that struck me about both of them is that the police and others noted that their emotional responses to finding someone murdered was not “typical.” When you see each woman in interviews, their emotionality is a bit flat and frankly off-putting, which is why the police might have been so suspicious. But what is a “typical” emotional response to finding your roommate stabbed in your flat, or your long-term boyfriend dead in the snow? What should our emotions look like?

If you asked anyone on the street what fear is, they would be able to tell you. The same with happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, and a long list of other emotions. We all (excluding your run of the mill psychopath) experience these emotions in our daily lives, which makes it seem like there indeed are appropriate and expected ways for us to respond to various emotional events, including murder. However, as it turns out, defining each of these emotions (and what an emotion is in general) is much harder than you’d think, and even the scientific community hasn’t reached an agreement on what an emotion is and how it should be measured. Some people think that emotions are built-in parts of our brain, kind of like the characters in the movie Inside Out, each with their own signature style. More recently, however, neuroscientists have argued that this isn’t the case, and there isn’t a single emotion that has a definitive and unique marker in the brain. Instead, emotions are much, much more complicated, and even simple emotions like sadness, fear, and anger are experienced and expressed differently from person to person.

In support of this view, one recent study demonstrated that when researchers gave over 300 people artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate emotional faces that look like happiness, fear, sadness, and anger, literally no two faces looked alike (Binetti et al., 2022). In other words, all 300 people tested had a different idea of what happiness, fear, sadness, and anger should look like, suggesting that perhaps even the simplest emotions are indeed expressed and recognized differently from person to person.

And this isn’t just true for adults; there is also evidence that emotional expression differs among children as well. For example, one study reported that US children between the ages of 3 and 6 rarely express any emotion in the same way, except for maybe happiness. When they express other emotions like sadness, fear, and anger, some features of their faces match the stereotypical features we think of for each of these emotions (e.g., scowling for anger, frowning for sadness, eyes wide open for fear), but rarely all of them (Gaspar & Esteves, 2012).

If there isn’t even a right or wrong way to express the most basic emotions like fear, anger, and sadness, what is the right way to respond to murder? Amanda Knox was eventually retried and acquitted of any crime, but not before spending most of her 20’s in prison, and all because her emotional reaction to finding her roommate dead was apparently wrong. But actual scientific research on emotions suggests that there isn’t a right or wrong way to react to any emotional situation. Indeed, we’re all complex, multi-faceted individuals, with complex multi-faceted emotions, and just because someone reacts to something emotionally in a way that seems off to you, it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with them, and it certainly doesn’t mean they are guilty of a crime. Karen Reed’s second trial is still ongoing, but we can hope that whatever the outcome, it is based on actual evidence, and not on how we feel about Karen’s personality or the way she reacts emotionally to situations, which are and should be unique, like each of us.

Image by [puamelia]/flickr

References

Binetti, N., Roubtsova, N., Carlisi, C., Cosker, D., Viding, E., & Mareschal, I. (2022). Genetic algorithms reveal profound individual differences in emotion recognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(45), e2201380119.

Gaspar, A., & Esteves, F. G. (2012). Preschooler’s faces in spontaneous emotional contexts—how well do they match adult facial expression prototypes? International Journal of Behavioral Development, 36(5), 348-357.

Gaspar, A., & Esteves, F. G. (2012). Preschooler’s faces in spontaneous emotional contexts—how well do they match adult facial expression prototypes? International Journal of Behavioral Development, 36(5), 348-357.