Do We Know What We Show?

You scowl at your husband for leaving the faucet dripping, but an hour laterhe does it again. Doesn't he realize how much it annoys you? The anger on your face was plain as day.

Well, maybe not. Our emotions don't come across as clearly on our faces as we think, say two Dartmouth psychologists. They videotaped undergraduates who were watching funny film clips. Afterwards the students estimated how expressive their faces had been as they laughed, and judges rated the students's amusement level by reviewing their reactions on video.

Where students thought they had guffawed, observers saw only chuckles. Upon seeing the tapes themselves, the students had to agree. Two-thirds were surprised how unexpressive their mugs were, report Carol Barr, Ph.D., and Robert Kleck, Ph.D., in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 68, No. 4).

The discrepancy between what our faces show and what we think they show may be even greater for negative emotions like disgust. That can have serious consequences for a relationship, says Barr: "One partner may feel like he or she is communicating their sadness or upset. But their face hasn't shown it." So we may accuse our partner of not caring--when the real problem is communication. The good news: Improvement is possible. Barr and Kleck found that people better gauge their facial expressiveness when they consciously work to communicate emotion.

Why do we so badly judge how much feeling we're getting across? Perhaps, says Barr, "we're taught in our culture to inhibit our facial reactions more than we realize." So we're unaware of how much emotion we automatically mask.

Then again, some folks, particularly hostile ones, simply aren't very good at reading others' faces, says Western Virginia University psychologist Kevin T. Larkin, Ph.D. He and Susan McClain measured the hostility of 100 students, then had them identify the emotions depicted in a series of slides.

Hostile students were good at identifying anger--but also tended to see anger where there was only disgust. And they were often blind to happiness, misreading joyful faces as neutral. The irony: Through such misinterpretation they miss an antidote to their hostility.

ILLUSTRATION: The husband and wife anger