Facial expressions are used to communicate emotions. They can also occur solitarily, without other people being present. People often imagine themselves in social situations when alone, resulting in solitary facial expressions. Toddlers and children in early childhood use social cues and contexts to discriminate and recognize facial expressions. They develop at this early stage facial expressions in order to provoke reactions from their caregivers and receive nurturance and support. Children reflect their peers' emotions in their own expressions for social interaction.
Facial expression discrimination and expression develop at varying rates in children. During middle childhood and adolescence, the abilities to discriminate and produce facial expressions are still on their way toward achieving full potential. Considering that the ability to discriminate and produce facial expressions develop independently, there is a gap between a child's capacity to discriminate an emotion on another's face and their capacity to produce certain emotions, such as anger or fear. Fear and anger are more difficult expressions to produce than happiness, a possible explanation being that children are socialized not to produce these, considered socially undesirable. Further research is required to fully explore this idea.
Discrimination and expression
Facial expressions are produced to express a reaction to a situation or event or to evoke a response from another individual or individuals. They are signals of emotion and social intent. People make faces in response to "direct audience effects" when they are watching sports, discussing politics, eating or smelling, in pain, and see or hear something humorous. While one may have the same emotional reaction to a particular situation, they are more likely to express this emotion via a facial expression if they are in a social situation. Smiles, in particular, are "evolved signaling displays [that] are the result of selective pressures for conspicuous, stereotyped, and redundant communication". Smiling is a visual signal that requires eye contact from the recipient to the one smiling and is intended to communicate a feeling of happiness and joy. In an experiment by Alan Fridlund, smiling occurred least when one was watching a video alone, then more often when a person was alone watching the video but believed a friend was performing another task, even more often when that person believed a friend was simultaneously watching the video somewhere else, and most often when one was watching a movie with a friend physically present. This evidence shows that even if someone has the same internal reaction to a stimulus (like a movie), they are more likely to externalize these feelings when surrounded by peers or under the assumption that peers are engaged in the same activity.
The production of facial expressions, however, is not solely limited to interpersonal situations. Since humans are largely social beings, they often imagine themselves in social situations even when they are alone. This phenomenon occurs in a variety of different contexts: treating oneself as a social interactant (talking to oneself), imagining others are present (either who are currently existent or have died), envisioning future social interactions, and personifying animals or inanimate objects (talking to pets). Solitary facial expressions are generated for an imagined other. According to role and impression- management theories, a perceived audience, whether real or imaginary, causes one to assume a role that is consistent with their audience. For example, a young girl may smile to herself in the mirror while imagining herself talking to a boy from class, but may grimace while imagining herself responding to her mother's scolding. Thus, "solitary faces occur for the same reasons as public ones, if only because when we are alone we create social interactions in our imaginations. They suggest the possibility that sociality may play a major role in the mediation of solitary faces". There are developmental differences in solitary facial expression, beginning with instinctive expressions in infancy and developing into more complex ones as a child's concept of sociality and emotion matures.
Discrimination and production of facial expressions in infants
A concept of sociality is acquired over time and through various social interactions. It has long been theorized that children expand the ability to regulate their facial expressions during the course of their development and that their expressions become "socialized" as they grow up. But how soon does socialization start and how big of a role does it play during infancy?