The accessibility of the term "contempt" and the meaning of the unilaterallip curl

Four studies are reported investigating the conditions under which various proposed facial expressions of contempt are labelled "contempt". Only under forced-choice conditions are any of these expressions labelled "contempt" above chance; free responses are at or below chance. Contrary to prediction s from Rosenberg and Ekman's (1995) explanation of poor free-response perfo rmance, participants demonstrating the best understanding of "contempt", an d those primed by prior tasks to have the concept readily accessible did no t do better than other subjects. Using the forced-choice paradigm, supposed ly neutral expressions were labelled "contempt" by 70% of respondents. It i s concluded that poor performance in free-response studies is not due to in accessibility or unfamiliarity of "contempt", that the unilateral lip curl included in the JACFEE set of expressions of basic emotions (Matsumoto & Ek man, 1988) is not decoded as contempt, and that good performance in forced- choice studies results from artifacts of the method.