Facial Expressions ________________________

acial Expression: A Primary Communication System

Expression implies a revelation about the characteristics of a person, a message about something internal to the expresser. In the context of the face and nonverbal communication, expression usually implies a change of a visual pattern over time, but as a static painting can express a mood or capture a sentiment, so too the face can express relatively static characteristics (sometimes called physiognomy). The concept of facial expression, thus, includes: 1. a characteristic of a person that is represented, i.e., the signified; 2. a visual configuration that represents this characteristic, i.e., the signifier; 3. the physical basis of this appearance, or sign vehicle, e.g., the skin, muscle movements, fat, wrinkles, lines, blemishes, etc.; and 4. typically, some person or other perceiver that perceives and interprets the signs. The existence and relationships among these components is a large area for study in the psychological and behavioral sciences. Facial expressions are an important channel of nonverbal communication.

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ntroduction

Emotion is one of the most controversial topics in psychology, a source of intense discussion and disagreement from the earliest philosophers and other thinkers to the present day. Most psychologists can probably agree on a description of emotion, e.g., what phenomena to include in a discussion of emotion. The enumeration of these parts of emotion are called the "components of emotion" here. These components are distinguished on the basis of physiological or psychological factors and include emotion faces, emotion elicitors, and emotion neural processes.

omponents of Emotion

The component that seems to be the core of common sense approaches to emotion, the one that most people have in mind when talking about human emotions, is the feeling component, i.e., the passion or sensation of emotion. For example, people generally agree that the state of mind during anger is different from that when one is happy. This component is also one of the most contentious in scientific discussions of emotion, raising many questions such as:

To what extent are such feelings, especially the claimed differences in quality, based on real physical differences? Is the feeling quality of a particular emotion shared among people? What is the nature of the differences in quality among emotions? What underlies or produces these feelings? What importance or function do such feelings have?

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of angry emotion experience: Another obvious descriptive component of "steamed up" with hot glowing emotion is the set of behaviors that may be eyes, and uncontrolled performed and observed in conjunction with appearance. Is it the same across an emotion. These behaviors are produced by people? the striated muscular system and are of two general types: gross behaviors of the body effected by the skeletal muscles and the socalled emotion expressions. These categories shade into each other because any behavior can be interpreted as expressing emotion. The gross body behaviors may have no apparent adaptive value, e.g., wringing and Interpersonal aggression in the rubbing the hands or tapping a foot, or they form of instrumental behaviors may be directed towards a goal, e.g., striking produced by skeletal muscles is something or running away. In the field of often a concomitant of anger. animal behavior, discovering the adaptive function and organization of behaviors in situations analogous to human emotion, and speculating on the evolutionary patterns of these behaviors is an established endeavor. This emphasis has not typically been given to the study of human emotions by psychologists. The facial and bodily behaviors called "emotion expressions" are indicators of emotion, as opposed to effecting some action or achieving some goal. These expressions can differentiate one emotion from another. The most widely discussed and investigated emotion expressions are the emotion faces. A bright idea can bring a pleasant emotion, or pleasant emotions can foster bright ideas.

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xpressions

The exercise below illustrates the importance of facial expressions for displaying emotion. It seems that there are seven principal facial expressions, which we are generally quite good at recognizing and which appear to be so universal that even children who have been blind and deaf from birth display them: Anger Disgust, contempt Fear Happiness Interest Sadness Surprise

These appear to involve configurations of the whole face, though the eyebrows and mouth carry much of the information. The importance of the area around the eyes and mouth is shown by observations which demonstrate that when we examine a photograph of a person's face, we scan the whole face, but concentrate primarily on the eyes and mouth. This is further supported by the use of 'emotions' or 'smiley' in e-mail, which suggest an emotion simply by showing the eyes (and/or eyebrows) and mouth:

xperiments

Facial expressions are essential to the establishment of relationships with others, as was demonstrated by Izard in an infamous experiment in which he severed the facial muscles of a newly born monkey, as a result of which it failed to establish a relationship with its mother. This simple experiment has been carried out across a wide range of different cultures and strongly suggests that, although of course there are differences in the extent to which different cultures permit the display of various emotions and the different ways they act on those emotions, the emotions themselves are 177

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common to all members of our species. Paul Ekman conducted the original experiments in the 1960s They demonstrated that those peoples were able to recognize the facial expressions of Berkely university students accurately and, conversely, that their facial expressions were recognized by Westerners. These results presented such a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of the 'Standard Social Science Model', according to which just about every facet of a human being's behaviour and mental life is the result of 'culture' and 'socialization' that Ekman;'s results were initially met with outrage. According to Pinker, one anthropologist tried to prevent him speaking on the grounds that his claims were fascist; on another occasion a black activist called him racist for claiming that blacks' facial expressions were no different from whites'.

ead these expressions

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Facial Judged as features Structural aspects thin lips Conscientious thick lips Sexy (female) high Intelligent forehead dull eyes not alert protruding Excitable eyes Persistent emotional expressions and their effects mouth friendly, cheerful, easy-going, kind, curvature likeable with a sense of humour, intelligent, well-adjusted facial determined, aggressive, quicktension tempered, not easy-going Grooming much feminine, sexy, frivolous (females) make-up dark or hostile (males) coarse skin spectacles intelligent, dependable, industrious

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motion and Facial Expression

Neither emotion nor its expression are concepts universally embraced by psychologists. The term "expression" implies the existence of something that is expressed. Some psychologists deny that there is really any specific organic state that corresponds to our naive ideas about human emotions; thus, its expression is a non sequitur. Other psychologists think that the behavior referenced by the term "expression" are part of an organized emotional response, and thus, the term "expression" captures these behaviors' role less adequately than a reference to it as an aspect of the emotion reaction. Still other psychologists think that facial expressions have primarily a communicative function and convey something about intentions or internal state, and they find the connotation of the term "expression" useful. Regardless of approach, certain facial expressions are associated with particular human emotions. Research shows that people categorize emotion faces in a similar way across cultures, which similar facial expressions tend to occur in response to particular emotion eliciting events, and that people produce simulations of emotion faces that are characteristic of each specific emotion. Despite some unsettled theoretical implications of these findings, a consensus view is that in studies of human emotions, it is often useful to know what facial expressions correspond to each specific emotion, and the answer is summarized briefly below. To match a facial expression with an emotion implies knowledge of the categories of human emotions into which expressions can be assigned. For millennia, scholars have speculated about categories of emotion, and recent scientific research has shown that facial expressions can be assigned reliably to about seven categories, though many other categories of human emotions are possible and used by philosophers, scientists, actors, and others concerned with emotion. The recent development of scientific tools for facial analysis, such as the Facial Action Coding System, has facilitated resolving category issues. The most robust categories are discussed in the following paragraphs. Happy Happy expressions are universally and easily recognized, and are interpreted as conveying messages related to enjoyment, pleasure, a positive disposition, and friendliness. Examples of happy expressions are the easiest of all emotions to find in photographs, and are readily produced by people on demand in the absence of any emotion. In fact, happy expressions may be practiced behaviors because they are used so often to hide other emotions and deceive or manipulate other people. Consider this 180

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point when viewing invariably smiling political figures and other celebrities on television. Detecting genuine happy expressions may be as valuable as producing good simulations. We can however easily differentiate between a genuine and a fake happy face. Sad Sad expressions are often conceived as opposite to happy ones, but this view is too simple, although the action of the mouth corners is opposite. Sad expressions convey messages related to loss, bereavement, discomfort, pain, helplessness, etc. Until recently, American culture contained a strong censure against public displays of sadness by men, which may account for the relative ease of finding pictures of sad expressions on female faces. A common sense view, shared by many psychologists, is that sad emotion faces are lower intensity forms of crying faces, which can be observed early in newborns, but differences noted between these two expressions challenge this view, though both are related to distress. Although weeping and tears are a common concommitant of sad expressions, tears are not indicative of any particular emotion, as in tears of joy. Anger Anger expressions are seen increasingly often in modern society, as daily stresses and frustrations underlying anger seem to increase, but the expectation of reprisals decrease with the higher sense of personal security. Anger is a primary concomitant of interpersonal aggression, and its expression conveys messages about hostility, opposition, and potential attack. Anger is a common response to anger expressions, thus creating a positive feedback loop and increasing the likelihood of dangerous conflict. Until recent times, a cultural prohibition on expression of anger by women, particularly uncontrolled rage expressions, created a distribution of anger expressions that differed between the sexes. The uncontrolled expression of rage exerts a toxic effect on the angry person, and chronic anger seems associated with certain patterns of behavior that correspond to unhealthy outcomes, such as Type A behavior. Although frequently associated with violence and destruction, anger is probably the most socially constructive emotion as it often underlies the efforts of individuals to shape societies into better, more just environments, and to resist the imposition of injustice and tyranny. Fear Fear expressions are not often seen in societies where good personal security is typical, because the imminent possibility of personal destruction, from interpersonal violence or impersonal dangers, is the primary elicitor of fear. Fear expressions convey information about 181

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imminent danger, a nearby threat, a disposition to flee, or likelihood of bodily harm. The specific objects that can elicit fear for any individual are varied. The experience of fear has an extremely negative felt quality, and is reduced, along with the bodily concomitants, when the threat has been avoided or has passed. Organization of behavior and cognitive functions are adversely affected during fear, as escape becomes the peremptory goal. Anxiety is related to fear, and may involve some of the same bodily responses, but is a longer term mood and the elicitors are not as immediate. Both are associated with unhealthy physical effects if prolonged. Disgust Disgust expressions are often part of the body's responses to objects that are revolting and nauseating, such as rotting flesh, insects in food, or other offensive materials that are rejected as unsuitable to eat. Obnoxious smells are effective in eliciting disgust reactions. Disgust expressions are often displayed as a commentary on many other events and people that generate adverse reactions, but have nothing to do with the primal origin of disgust as a rejection of possible foodstuffs. Surprise Surprise expressions are fleeting, and difficult to detect or record in real time. They almost always occur in response to events that are unanticipated, and they convey messages about something being unexpected, sudden, novel, or amazing. The brief surprise expression is often followed by other expressions that reveal emotion in response to the surprise feeling or to the object of surprise, emotions such as happiness or fear. For example, most of us have been surprised, perhaps intentionally, by people who appear suddenly or do something unexpected ("to scare you"), and elicit surprise, but if the person is a friend, a typical afteremotion is happiness; but if a stranger, fear. A surprise seems to act like a reset switch that shifts our attention. Surprise expressions occur far less often than people are disposed to say "that surprises me," etc., because in most cases, such phrases indicate a simile, not an emotion. Nevertheless, intellectual insights can elicit actual felt surprise and may spur scholarly achievements. Surprise is to be distinguished from startle, and their expressions are quite different. Other emotion expressions and related expressions Some psychologists have differentiated other emotions and their expressions from those mentioned above. These other emotion or related expressions include contempt, shame, and startle. Contempt is related to disgust, and involves some of the same actions, but differs from it, in part, because its elicitors are different and its actions are more asymmetrical. Shame also has a relation to disgust according to some psychologists, but recent evidence suggests it may have a 182

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distinct expression. Most psychologists consider startle to be different from any human emotions, more like a reflex to intense sudden stimulation. The startle expression is unique.

Everybody wants to see a Happy face.

So flash a smile. As they say a smile costs nothing but buys everything
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