Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 34 of 91
Faces give away our emotions
Paul Ekman, professor emeritus from the University of California–San Francisco, seldom misinterprets people’s faces. He has cataloged more than 10,000 possible combinations of facial expressions, creating an inventory called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This research instrument allows a trained observer to dissect an expression in terms of all the muscular actions that produced it. Using this tool, Ekman has found several surprising things about human facial recognition. First, people all over the world express similar emotions using similar facial muscles. These universal basic emotions are happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger, and fear. (The finding was originally quite startling; research at the time chalked up facial expressions mostly to cultural mores.) Second, the conscious control we can exert over our facial features is limited, which means we give away a lot of free information. The muscles that surround our eyes, for example, are not under conscious management. This may be why we tend to believe them more.