Are facial expression technologies tools for emotion recognition or social interaction analysis, or both?

Basic Emotions Theory has been the most dominant theory in producing techniques for emotion perception studies. Such methodologies do not take into account that social factors may have an effect on how facial expressions are perceived. Gossip—a common but understudied tool of human communication—occurs in social interactions, so lends itself well to being considered as a social arena where facial expressions are produced. This paper takes the novel approach of using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to analyse facial expressions produced in response to gossip and to model the relationship with people’s perceptions of the same social interactions. The results show similar patterns of relationships between action units and with social-related or emotion-related labels. We suggest that social-related labelling for such perceptions should be considered as much as the traditional emotion-related labelling commonly used when creating emotion perception experimental paradigms.