Three Face Reading Tips
November 15th, 2007(This post is part 2 in my series about the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a system for classifying facial movements. Here is part 1, for those who missed it.)
Quick overview: FACS is a system developed by psychologists Paul Ekman and Wally Friesen, using the notion of individual Action Units (AUs) to identify and classify someone’s facial motions. The technique can be applied to both film and photographs, though photographs are usually much easier to code, for obvious reasons. People training in FACS use both media in training, as well as trying to make all the AUs on their own faces. (That’s right, part of your training is to make specific faces at other people. Kids, don’t let those mean old adults squash your dreams.) After this, they learn to practice scoring on various examples and compare them with Ekman and Friesen’s scores.
Ironically, Ekman’s original intention with FACS was to disprove the idea that facial expression of emotion are universal and innate. He believed (as Margaret Mead did) that facial expressions were learned and culture-specific, passed on through the years.
Unfortunately for his hypothesis, Ekman found out exactly the opposite was true. (Darwin turned out to be right yet again; he held the opposite view personally.) When showing photos of various faces to a variety of people, from Japan to New Guinea, Ekman found most everyone agreed on what the faces meant (i.e., what emotions those faces represented). This was true even for indigenous people who had no prior contact with the outside world.
(Finding people this remote was actually quite difficult, as pretty much everyone has had at least limited contact with the outside world for many years now. During a trip I took to Chile a few years back, I saw people out in the country in crude mud buildings with satellite dishes perched on top and DVDs playing inside. Talk about incongruity.)
Most faces, Ekman found, have a universal meaning, as opposed to body language and gestures, which are usually culture-specific. (Just ask an Italian.) The universal vocabulary is at least true for 7 basic emotions: anger, digust, fear, sadness, contempt, happiness, and surprise. Perhaps others as well, but it includes at a minimum those 7.
For this post, I’ll be focusing on just 4 of these - fear/sadness (I’ll cover these together), contempt, and happiness. My goal is to show you how to quickly identify these emotions on people’s faces, even when they are subtle or concealed.
Before I do that, I ought to add a few words of caution. First, as Ekman says, you should really be careful doing this kind of facial analysis on people. While certain facial movements are highly correlated with certain emotions, this link is not ironclad, and many people have their own facial “take” on a particular emotion, which can differ subtly from the prototypical face. (And “the internet told me to” is not a good enough reason to antagonize your loved ones for testing, dear reader.)
Second, just because you’ve identified a person as feeling a certain way doesn’t mean you know why they’re feeling that way. Someone’s intent, as Sun Tzu mentions in “The Art of War”, can only be determined for sure by asking the person in question. (Chapter 13, part 5, for the curious.) Often this will mean you’re aware of an emotion someone is feeling, but you can’t mention it directly. Using FACS this way is more of an informational tool than anything.
Third, FACS coding is a labor-intensive and laborious process. Learning FACS for real can take 100 hours or more. (And a solid capacity for making a fool out of yourself making faces doesn’t hurt, I might add. If you’ve read any number of my posts in here, you’ll notice I don’t mind making an arse of myself regularly.) Plus, even when you know FACS, it can sometimes take 100 times as long (or more) to code a video than to watch it. It’s not meant to be used on the fly, as Ekman himself says.
To address all these concerns, I’m going to keep everything simple and well within reach of the average untrained reader. The facial cues I’ll mention are some of the strongest and easiest-to-see signs of these 4 emotions (fear/sadness, contempt, and happiness). Even then, you should treat others’ emotions with care. We’re not talking about a science project here, but about living, breathing people who often don’t know that you’re scrutinizing their faces. (So please, at least tell them it’s for “science” before you start torturing them.)
All joking aside, there are some serious ethical concerns here. In Macolm Gladwell’s article on Paul Ekman and FACS, he addresses those specific ethical concerns and concludes that they are indeed legitimate reasons for not learning FACS. He feels (like other people I know) that if you knew how someone else was feeling and they were trying to hide it, you’re in an awkward situation where you feel obligated to say something yet know you probably shouldn’t.
The way I see it, though, this is good knowledge to have even if you don’t act on it. (Allan Pease says a similar thing about body language in his book on the topic.) If nothing else, FACS can help you know what your face is telling other people, even if you don’t plan to use it on others.
And if you do use FACS on others, take care that you’re not prying too much and that your intentions are noble. If your intentions are less than noble, then, well, at least a lot of this information was already freely available. Plus, as Ekman admits in his book “Telling Lies”, nefarious types probably already understand some of this stuff intuitively without my help. I doubt any future con men are getting their start from this post. (And if they were, they’d probably lie about it, so we’ll never know.)
Whew. With all that out of the way, it’s time to get to the real meat of this post. (I’m a vegetarian myself, actually, but I’m not gonna let that get in the way of a good metaphor.)
The first face-reading tip concerns AU 1, or the inner eyebrow raise. You can find an example of this Action Unit here. The inner eyebrow raise is strongly correlated with feelings of fear and sadness. (And trips to the dentist. Unless you’re a dental assistant. And you enjoy your job. Sheesh, this is complicated!)
AU 1 is also more difficult than most other facial motions to fake. Give it a try if you want to see what I mean. You probably will have no trouble raising your entire eyebrows, but if you try to raise just the inner portions, you should have a lot more trouble. Something like 90 percent of people can’t do AU 1 voluntarily without training (if I remember right), according to Ekman. I had trouble at first, but I now think my AU 1 is passable.
If you think AU 1 is hard, though, try and do AU 2, the outer eyebrow raise. I think this is probably the most difficult AU of all to do, and the only one I still can’t really do, even after many hours of training. Good luck.
What’s interesting, though, is that the inner eyebrow raise is frequently done involuntarily when you feel fear or sadness. If you can try to imagine something really scary or horrible and look in the mirror, you will probably see your inner eyebrows shoot up, “as if on a string” (to quote Ekman). So AU 1 is hard to do on purpose, but easy to do involuntarily when you’re actually feeling fear or sadness. That makes AU 1 an excellent emotional indicator.
Once you know what to look for, you’ll see AU 1 on people’s faces all the time. Some people (chronic worriers) show it at the slightest disturbance. Watching their faces can be almost comical. (Woody Allen seems to have made a career of it, in fact.)
Other people show it as a “microexpression”, or a brief version of AU 1, often lasting a fraction of a second. You can pick out microexpressions easily with training, but without experience they are much easier to miss. They’re simple enough to learn, though, that Paul Ekman made a micro/subtle expression training program, which can teach you, in under an hour, to pick them out yourself. I bought the CD myself and I can personally vouch that it’s a great product.
AU 1, like the other two AUs I’ll mention, is obvious enough that you can probably pick it out as a microexpression without Ekman’s training CD, though I’m sure it would help. Anyway, if you see someone do an inner eyebrow raise, they’re probably fearful, sad, or both (depending on other AUs). You can often figure out which by context. (For example, sometimes when I contemplate my future as blogger, I experience both quite vividly.) AU 1 is especially useful in figuring out the difference between fear and surprise; this motion is the main way to distinguish between these two closely related emotions. (In fact, they’re so close that some other cultures do not make a facial distinction between the two.)
The second face-reading tip is about the lip curl, or a one-sided version of AU 10, the upper lip raise (often occurring on the right side of the face). Two examples of this are here (bottom right) and here (scroll down to the bottom). As you can see from those links, a lip curl is strongly associated with contempt. Like the inner eyebrow raise, you will often see both longer lip curls and microexpression versions. Probably every day I hear someone talk about something they don’t like, and most of the time some version of a lip curl will show up on their face, like clockwork. Once you start looking for the lip curl, you’ll also start seeing it frequently. (Hopefully not TOO frequently, though.) And like the inner eyebrow raise, its meaning is mostly clear and easy to pick out.
You can probably do a one sided AU 10 without much difficulty. However, contempt is usually not something people lie about, Ekman says, so it’s still a pretty good emotional indicator. Contempt is rarely shown in the media, so much so that Ekman couldn’t find any stock pictures of it for his book “Emotions Revealed”. That is, contempt is not something people go out of their way to practice or fake. So, unless you’re Elvis, most lip curls mean contempt.
The last, and possibly most interesting, tip concerns the cheek raise, or AU 6. You can find an example of AU 6 here. If you try to wink or close one eye, you’ll probably do a one-sided AU 6. (You may also do a lower eyelid tightener, AU 7, or a smile, AU 12, as well. The method’s not perfect.) You can also try squinting, though that won’t probably won’t be a pure AU 6 either. Basically, you try to raise your cheeks without raising the corners of your lips (much). Not everyone can naturally do AU 6 in isolation. Nevertheless, you should get the idea.
AU 6 is the key difference between fake, forced smiles and real smiles, also called “Duchenne smiles”. (That’s how AU 6 relates to happiness.) You can see the difference here. The first smile is only AU 12, the second is at least AUs 6 and 12 together. As that Duchenne smile link suggests, you’re looking for subtle differences around the eyes.
The easiest way to distinguish a real smile is whether there are any “crow’s feet” next to the eyes or not. This works well for subtle smiles, but larger smiles will often have crow’s feet whether they are forced or not. The only way to tell for sure, in all cases, is to see if the outer eyebrows and “eye cover folds” (the fleshy areas underneath the outer eyebrow) pull down slightly. This is harder to see, but it’s a more universal indicator of the real smile. You may need to try smiling at a mirror to get the idea. (You’ll have to do a real smile on your own somehow, though. Contemplating a statement such as “bloggers are quickly replacing traditional media” should do nicely.)
When you see AUs 6 and 12 together, the eyes will often look like they are “sparkling” or “shining”. If you have trouble with the other aformentioned methods, this may help you. In fact, this is the method I use in the majority of cases, when I don’t have a lot of time to study someone’s face. My guess is that the cheek raise constricts the eye aperture more than usual, causing light to reflect off your eyes more directly and making them shine more. That’s just a theory, though. (I take no responsibility for anyone using this on their significant other. I don’t think “your cheek raise really constricts your eye aperture, and therefore makes your eyes shine like jewels” would go over too well.)
Anyway, that’s my three tips to read faces better. Ready for a test? Turns out the BBC has a great page where you guess if smiles are real or fake. I thought it was a fun test, so feel free to give it a try.
For the record, I got 16 right out of 20. You might think that’s low for someone who learned all of FACS and even trained on Ekman’s micro/subtle expression tool. But, as Ekman notes, most people do no better than chance in spotting real vs. posed faces. Secret Service people are one of the very rare exceptions, according to Ekman. You know what their average rate of lie detection is, based on face reading? 80 percent, or exactly what I got on that test. Now I’m obviously not as highly trained as they are, and I won’t be jumping in front of any bullets anytime soon based on my predictions, but I think that’s a respectable score.
Then again, maybe you’ll be able to beat me and laugh. Consider it a challenge. But at least I’ll have a good chance of knowing your laughter is genuine.
Additional Reading:
Emotions Revealed, an excellent book Paul Ekman wrote about how the face and body language signal emotions
Great Wired article on Ekman
Another cool article on Ekman
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November 16th, 2007 at 3:02 am
That’s awesome stuff. I tried out the test and got 17/20 right. I must be a face reading prodigy!
Pretty cool Matt. I am humbled before your face reading skills.
- Dave
November 16th, 2007 at 3:05 am
Also, the ones I got wrong were all real smiles that I thought were fake. I bet those people were depressed or something. They didn’t look very happy to me.
That’s what I meant about different “takes” on smiles and other facial expressions. Plus, when you suspect deceit in a test like this, such concerns loom larger than they actually are.
- Dave
January 25th, 2008 at 2:44 am
[…] few weeks ago I wrote about how to read faces, as well as people’s underlying emotions. In a related vein, this week I’d like to talk […]