A A facial expression is best defined as one or more motions or positions of the muscles on the face. 1It can often be used to convey an emotional state of a person and is easy for anyone paying attention to understand. As notable author Charles Dickens once said, “The expression of a man's face is commonly a help to express his thoughts, or a glossary on his speech.” 2Facial expressions are also classified as a form of non-verbal communication and a way of conveying information. This is not unique to humans, as many animals can exhibit facial expressions that are just as easy to understand.
B 11A major misconception when discussing facial expressions is to assume that they are voluntary. 3Facial expressions are very much tied to emotion and are often involuntary. Someone who is sad could attempt to exert a lot of internal effort to convey the opposite and declare to the world they are in fact happy. But they are likely to show their true feelings involuntarily in the end, even though they attempt to show their feelings in quite opposite ways.
7This nature of facial expressions is not unique to how someone feels about themselves. Sometimes it can lead to embarrassing social situations.For example, a person could involuntarily give the message that they find someone they just met unattractive by showing a brief expression of disgust. They may intend to show a less offensive expression yet they just cannot help but show how they truly feel.
C 4-5Not all emotions are easy to understand. Quite the opposite holds true, as the feelings of disgust and fear are difficult to tell apart. The reason for this is simple: the face has minimal ranges of movements and the difference between disgust and fear breaks down to very minuscule differences in the relative position of facial features.
Sometimes a person's face could express a neutral emotion — as is typically the case during a period when everything is normal and there is no stress. However, it is possible that the specific proportions of a neutral facial expression closely resemble a face associated with a specific emotion. A scenario where someone is looking at their new coworker or friend and assuming they are sad when they are not is a daily occurrence and happens quite often.
D A person's eyes can also reveal how they are feeling at any given moment. William Shakespeare once said, “The eyes are the window to your soul.” — And it is for a good reason. Boston College professor Joe Tecce found a correlation between blinking and stress. He explained that rapid blinking is related to unpleasant feelings, especially among liars.
However, the key to the theory is that the person needs to feel bad about lying. People who gain pleasure from lying, such as psychopaths, will not show a similar rapid blinking trait. 9As such, non-verbal traits and cues are multi-channeled and focusing on only one cue is reckless.
Poker players are best known for being experts in evaluating facial characteristics. A novice poker player who is bluffing will more likely than not blink when putting chips on the table. An expert facial expression reader will not hesitate to take advantage of his advantage to win a hand. Similarly, all it takes is a brief nanosecond for a novice poker player to visually tell the world he is holding excellent cards. The expert poker players will instantly fold their hand and avoid falling into a potential trap.
E Charles Darwin stated in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that people of all ages, along with animals, show emotions through similar behaviours.6He also thought at the time that a human face could show just a few emotions. This theory contradicted French physician Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne who argued a human could express at least 60 different emotions.
F 12In the 1960s, studies by scientist Paul Ekman supported Darwin's stance to a large degree. Ekman evaluated adults and children from a very isolated region in New Guinea to see if there are any differences in responses compared to people in less isolated societies. Participants listened to a story which describes one particular emotion and were then shown either two or three pictures of facial expressions. They had to match the facial expression with the overall theme of the story.
10Isolated people from the South Fore region of New Guinea were able to identify the accurate facial expression at the same rate as the non-isolated control group. The study also found that emotions for fear and surprise were consistently misidentified.
G The reason for selecting New Guinea was based on early feedback to similar tests among people in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Japan, and the United States.13Ekman had found that the participants across the five geographically dispersed locations had similar facial expressions for emotions.
He questioned his own study and asked, “What if these five cultures had all grown up watching the same movies and television shows? Could it be that the reason they all agree is they have learned these expressions from the same place? Could the reason for their agreement be their similar backgrounds and experiences? Learned from media or actors for example?”
Exploring the highlands of New Guinea where ancient traditions and ways of life are supreme should remove all doubts to his findings. The people in New Guinea most certainly did not grow up watching the same movies like those in the United States. His study has stood the test of time as more modern approaches have come to the same conclusion.
H Finally, certain expressions of emotions are also found to be universally accepted. Among those are anger, disgust, joy, sadness, and surprise. Of particular note, none of these emotions has a definitive social component, such as shame or pride.
8Findings on contempt (which has a social component) are less clear. There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that the expressions of contempt and other social emotions vary across cultures.
