The Influence of Social Context on Adolescents’ use of Prototypical Facial Expressions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adolescents’ social behaviour varies by social context (e.g., who they are with); they might ‘play it cool’ with peers while displaying vulnerability with caregivers. Yet, the way in which social context affects teenagers’ nonverbal expression is unknown. The current study addresses this knowledge gap by examining how teenagers’ facial expressions differs when discussing emotionally charged topics with a friend vs. with a caregiver. Thirty-one 11 to 16-year-old participants engaged in two separate conversations, with their caregiver and friend, respectively (social context). Within each context, they spoke about emotionally charged topics (happy vs angry) of their choosing (emotional type). Facial analysis software (iMotions) was employed to quantify the prototypicality of angry and happy facial expressions. Two separate within-subject factorial (2x2) ANOVAs were conducted to assess the effect of social context and emotional type on the prototypicality of happy and angry facial expressions. There was a significant main effect of social context on prototypical facial cues of anger (F(1, 30) = 5.45, p = .026) with adolescents exhibiting more prototypical angry expressions with their friends than with their caregivers. Moreover, there was a significant main effect of emotional type on prototypical facial cues of happiness (F(1, 30) = 4.72, p = .038) with adolescents displaying more prototypical happy facial expressions when discussing happy topics compared to angry topics. No other effects were significant. The above main effects were rendered non-significant after accounting for sex assigned at birth and age. As the current study is ongoing, the next steps will be to increase our sample size to boost statistical power and to investigate whether the change in non-verbal encoding we observe across social context relates to teens' socio-emotional functioning. With these results, we can better support teenagers in their emotional expression to foster relationship formation and social success throughout adolescence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".