How we make and read the fleeting split-second expressions that
slip acrossour countenances thousands of times each day is crucial to our
emotional health as individuals and to our survival as a species.
Who hasn't waited for an old friend at an airport and scanned faces
impatiently as passengers come hurrying through the gate? You can
recognize instantly the travelers with no one to meet them, their gaze
unfocused, their expressions carefully neutral; the people expecting to
be met, their eyes narrowed, their lips poised on the edge of a smile;
the children returning home to their parents, their small laughing faces
turned up in greeting. Finally, your own friend appears, face lighting up
as you come into view. If a mirror suddenly dropped down before you,
there'd be that same goofy smile on your face, the same look of
uncomplicated pleasure.
Poets may celebrate its mystery and artists its beauty, but they
miss the essential truth of the human countenance. As scientists now are
discovering, the power of the face resides in the fleeting split-second
expressions that slip across it thousands of times each day They guide
our lives, governing the way we relate to each other as individuals and
the way we connect together as a society. Indeed, scientists assert, the
ability to make faces--and read them--is vital both to our personal
health and to our survival as a species.
Growing out of resurging interest in the emotions, psychologists
have been poring over the human visage with the intensity of
cryptographers scrutinizing a hidden code. In fact, the pursuits are
strikingly similar. The face is the most extraordinary communicator,
capable of accurately signaling emotion in a bare blink of a second,
capable of concealing emotion equally well. "In a sense, the face is
equipped to lie the most and leak the most, and thus can be a very
confusing source of information," observes Paul Ekman, Ph.D., professor
of psychology at the University of California in San Francisco and a
pioneer in studying the human countenance.
"The face is both ultimate truth and rata morgana," declares Daniel
McNeill, author of the new book The Face (Little Brown & Company), a
vivid survey of face-related lore from the history of the nose to the
merits of plastic surgery. "It is a magnificent surface, and in the last
20 years, we've learned more about it than in the previous 20
millennia."
Today, scientists are starting to comprehend the face's
contradiction, to decipher the importance of both the lie and leak, and
to puzzle out a basic mystery. Why would an intensely social species like
ours, reliant on communication, be apparently designed to give mixed
messages? By connecting expression to brain activity with extraordinary
precision, researchers are now literally going beyond "skin deep" in
understanding how the face connects us, when it pulls us apart. "The face
is a probe, a way of helping us see what's behind people's interactions,"
explains psychology professor Dacher Kelther, Ph.D., of the University of
California-Berkeley Among the new findings:
o With just 44 muscles, nerves, and blood vessels threaded through
a scaffolding of bone and cartilage, all layered over by supple skin, the
face can twist and pull into 5,000 expressions, all the way from an
outright grin to the faintest sneer.
o There's a distinct anatomical difference between real and feigned
expressions--and in the biological effect they produce in the creators of
those expressions.
o We send and read signals with lightning-like speed and over great
distances. A browflash--the lift of the eyebrow common when greeting a
friend lasts only a sixth of a second. We can tell in a blink of a second
if a strangers face is registering surprise or pleasure--even if he or
she is 150 feet away
o Smiles are such an important part of communication that we see
them far more clearly than any other expression. We can pick up a smile
at 300 feet--the length of a football field.
o Facial expressions are largely universal, products of biological
imperatives. We are programmed to make and read faces. "The abilities to
express and recognize emotion are inborn, genetic, evolutionary,"
declares George Rotter, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Montclair
University in New Jersey
o Culture, parenting, and experience can temper our ability to
display and interpret emotions. Abused children may be prone to trouble
because they cannot correctly gauge the meaning and intent of others'
facial expressions.
Making FACES
Deciphering facial expressions first entails understanding how they
are created. Since the 1980s, Ekman and Wallace Friesen, Ph.D., of the
University of California in San Francisco, have been painstakingly ino
ventorying the muscle movements that pull our features into frowns,
smiles, and glares. Under their Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a
wink is Action Unit 46, involving a twitch of a single muscle, the
obicularis oculi, which wraps around the eye. Wrinkle your nose (Action
Unit 09), that's a production of two muscles, the levator labii
superioris and the alaeque nasi.
The smile, the most recognizable signal in the world, is a much
more complex endeavor. Ekman and colleagues have so far identified 19
versions, each engaging slightly different combinations of muscles.
Consider two: the beam shared by lovers reunited after a long absence and
the smile given by a teller passing back the deposit slip to a bank
patron.
