Face it!

How we make and read the fleeting split-second expressions that slip across our countenances thousands of times each day is crucial to our emotional health as individuals and to our survival as a species.

By Deborah Blum, published on September 01, 1998 - last reviewed on September 29, 2009

We seem to be duped particularly easily by a smile. In fact, we tend to implicitly trust a smiling face, just as we do a baby-faced one. In one experiment, Rotter cut out yearbook photos of college students and then asked people to rate the individuals pictured for trustworthiness. In almost every instance, people chose the students with smiling faces as the most honest. Women with the biggest grins scored the best; men needed only a slight curve of the lips to be considered truthful. "Smiles are an enormous controller of how people perceive you," says Rotter. "It's an extremely powerful communicator, much more so than the eyes."

Incidentally, we aren't suckered only by human faces. We can be equally and easily tricked by our fellow primates. In one classic story, a young lowland gorilla gently approached a keeper, stared affectionately into his face, gave him a hug--and stole his watch. Chimpanzees, too, are famous for their friendly-faced success in luring lab workers to approach, and then triumphantly spraying them with a mouthful of water.

There are clues to insincerity. We tend to hold a simulated expression longer than a real one. If we look carefully, a phony smile may have the slightly fixed expression that a child's face gets when setting a smile for a photograph. As we've discussed, we also use different muscles for felt and fake expressions. And we are apt to blink more when we're lying. But not always--and that's the problem. When Canadian researchers Susan Hyde, Kenneth Craig, and Chrisopher Patrick asked people to simulate an expression of pain, they found that the fakers used the same facial muscles--lowering their brows, tightening their lips--as did those in genuine pain. In fact, the only way to detect the fakers was that the expressions were slightly exaggerated and "blinking occurred less often, perhaps because of the cognitive demands to act as if they were in pain," the scientists explain.

We do a better job of finding a falsehood by listening to the tone of a voice or examining the stance of a body than by reading the face, maintains Ekman, who has served as a consultant for police departments, intelligence agencies, and antiterrorist groups. He's even been approached by a national television network--"I can't tell you which one"--eager to train its reporters to better recognize when sources are lying.

Which brings us to perhaps the most provocative mystery of the face: why are we so willing to trust in what the face tells us, to put our faith in a steady gaze, a smiling look? With so much apparently at stake in reading facial cues correctly, why are we so prone to mistakes?

LIVING SMOOTHLY

Most of us don't pick up lies and, actually, most of us don't care to," declares Ekman. "Part of the way politeness works is that we expect people to mislead us sometimes--say, on a bad hair day. What we care about is that the person goes through the proper role."

Modern existence, it seems, is predicated to some extent on ignoring the true meaning of faces: our lives run more smoothly if we don't know whether people really find our. jokes funny. It runs more smoothly if we don't know when people are lying to us. And perhaps it runs more smoothly if men can't read women's expressions of distress.

Darwin himself told of sitting across from an elderly woman on a railway carriage and observing that her mouth was pulled down at the corners. A proper British Victorian, he assumed that no one would display grief while traveling on public transportation. He began musing on what else might cause her frown.

While he sat there, analyzing, the woman's eyes suddenly overflowed with tears. Then she blinked them away, and there was nothing but the quiet distance between two passengers. Darwin never knew what she was thinking. Hers was a private grief, not to be shared with a stranger.

There's a lesson in that still, for all of us airport face-watchers today. That we may always see only part of the story, that what the face keeps secret may be as valuable as what it shares.

PHOTO (COLOR): A SHOCKING MOMENT: Oksana Baiul gets emotional on winning Olympic gold.

PHOTO (COLOR): Brazil's Cafu celebrates a goal at soccer's World Cup finals.

PHOTOS (COLOR):Four Faces of Joy (clockwise): Michael Jordan, Kim Basinger, Willem Dafoe, and Dot Richardson.

PHOTOS (COLOR): Faces of Sadness (from left): despairing woman waits for word of husband; Grambling head coach Eddie Robinson; an unhappy 3-year-old get unwelcom instructions.

PHOTOS (COLOR): Faces of Sadness (from left): Robert J. Kennedy Jr. at brother's funeral, mourner at Oklahoma City Remembrance; Jennifer Capriati react to press questions.

PHOTOS (COLOR): Anger and Disgust (clockwise): Jimmy Johnson of the Miami Dolphins, Ted Turner, Kate Moss, and Venus Williams.

PHOTO (COLOR): SMILES, the mos recognizable signal of HAPPINESS in the world, are so important that we can SEE them far more clearly than any other EXPRESSION--even at 300 feet, the length of a FOOTBALL field.

PHOTO (COLOR): We can move PEOPLE from culture to culture and they KNOW how to make and read the same basic expressions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust surprise, and happiness. The six appear to be HARDWIRED in our brains. EMBARRASEMENT, some suspect, may be a seventh.

PHOTO (COLOR): When it comes to READING the subtleties of emotion, women are the stronger SEX, While men almost alsways correctly recognize happiness in a female face, they pick up on DISTRES just 70% of the time. A WOMAN'S face has to be really sad for men to see it.