EVERYBODY knows a genuine smile when they see one. The corners of the mouth turn up, of course, but the expression is all in the eyes. Those wrinkly crow’s feet around the edges are what distinguish this from an inauthentic or social smile. They are what make it a sure-fire sign that someone is happy. Right?
Well, maybe not. And the same goes for all the other facial expressions of emotion. It may sound heretical, but psychologists are starting to question whether these really do reveal our emotions – or whether they might serve a more nefarious purpose.
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The orthodox view holds that there is a group of basic emotions – at least six, but perhaps many more – that all humans display on their faces in fundamentally the same way. This means that other people can reliably read your emotional state from your face. It is an appealing idea that has influenced everything from educational practices and behavioural-learning programmes for children with autism to emotion-detecting software algorithms. But now it is being challenged. Some dissenters believe that facial “expressions” aren’t reliable guides to our emotions at all, but tools that we use to manipulate others. If this is correct, the implications for our social interactions are enormous.
The idea that patterns of facial muscular movements express and indicate our emotions has a long history. It was popularised by influential 17th-century French artist Charles Le Brun, a court painter to Louis XIV, who prescribed the facial configurations for six “passions”: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness. A couple of centuries later, , Charles Darwin wrote that there were universal facial expressions associated with happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise.
Better experimental data appearing to back this up came in the 1960s, when US psychologist Paul Ekman conducted fieldwork in a remote part of what is now Papua New Guinea. This was taken as evidence that these are indeed shared by people everywhere. His work was immensely influential and inspired other studies seeming to support the idea that the human face is a universal billboard for our emotions.
Over the past decade, however, fresh research conducted in small-scale societies with little access to Western culture has challenged these conclusions, says Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University in Boston. Take her team’s work with the Himba, a group of people living in northern Namibia. Avoiding a perceived weakness in earlier studies, the researchers didn’t ask the Himba to match a facial expression to a brief emotional story or emotion-linked word. Instead, participants were asked to sort 36 images of posed facial expressions – the prototypical expressions of anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness and neutral – into piles by emotion type. Their responses didn’t support the universal basic emotions model, whereas those of a US comparison group did. The team concluded that .
Research by Carlos Crivelli at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, has yielded similar results. In 2013, he made his first trip to Papua New Guinea to study the people of the Trobriand Islands, who are subsistence farmers and fishers. He has found that they too that Westerners do. For example, they interpret the classic “gasping” fear face as threatening and indicative of aggression – an unexpected match that Crivelli has since found in some other small-scale societies, such as the Mwani of the Quirimbas archipelago in Mozambique.
Supporters of the orthodox view argue that there is increasing agreement about how emotions are displayed on faces across a very diverse range of cultures. But Crivelli, Barrett and others are convinced that there is no such thing as universal emotional expressions. If there were, why would we teach young children that a smile indicates happiness and a frown sadness, asks Crivelli, whose daughter recently came home from nursery school proudly showing off the “surprise face” she had learned. In fact, he believes that what we call “emotional expressions” don’t relate to emotion at all.
Instead, he thinks they are tools we wield – usually unconsciously – to get what we want from others. And in 2018, Crivelli and Alan Fridlund at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in favour of the idea.
In this view, pioneered by Fridlund, the supposed prototypical expressions of emotions take on new meanings, which aren’t necessarily universal. A smile is a signal to work together, bond or be friends. A pout is designed to garner care or protection rather than to indicate sadness. Scowling, the supposed expression of anger, may be used to trigger another person to submit. A gasping face signals submission, not fear (in the West at least), and so could deflect an attack. Nose scrunching, traditionally associated with disgust, is reconceived as a rejection of the way a social interaction is playing out.
“Not all cultures share the dogma that people smile when happy, scowl when angry and so on”
We may find it hard to revise our ideas about facial expressions. But not all cultures share the entrenched dogma that people smile when happy, scowl when angry and so on. When Crivelli asks Trobriand Islanders if they think it is possible to read the emotions of other people in their faces, they usually answer “no”. “They say we normally ‘have a face’, but it is to seduce you, to force you to do things for me,” he says. “They are engaged in dealing and bargaining every day, and they will say that if you want to get a good deal, smiling will help.”
Recast facial movements in this way, and it changes how you perceive your social interactions. This morning, when I furrowed my brow at my young son, it wasn’t because I was angry but to prompt him to submit to my instruction to hurry up and get dressed. I smiled at his head teacher because it would set the tone for a cordial chat. And I beamed at a toddler in a pushchair because I wanted to convey that I wasn’t a threat. Both of these smiles were genuine signals of support and camaraderie, not polite or insincere expressions of emotion.
Even if we concede that a smile does more than display happiness, surely the conventional view of smiling is supported by the fact that people produce an “authentic” smile that reaches the eyes – a so-called Duchenne smile – whenever they feel genuinely happy? Well, there is some evidence that this isn’t a fact at all.
Crivelli and his colleagues found that whether victorious judo fighters produced a Duchenne smile depended more on their than on the joy they presumably felt on winning a medal. Another study found that tenpin bowlers tended not to smile when they scored a strike, but only when they . Contrary to popular perception, there is even evidence that Duchenne smiles can be faked (see “Poker face?”).
What’s more, research on what people’s faces actually do when they report feeling a given emotion reveals a lot of variation – even within countries and individuals, says Barrett, who recently led a review of more than 1000 studies of facial movements and emotions. when they are angry about 30 per cent of the time. That is more than you would expect by chance, but still means that 70 per cent of the time, when someone is angry, their face is doing something else. “They might cry, or smile, or widen their eyes and gasp,” says Barrett. “Also, people scowl at other times – when confused, when concentrating, when they have gas.”
Most of the time people who are happy do something other than smile, Barrett adds. A smile can occur when someone is happy, but also when they are afraid, angry, shy, relieved, embarrassed, or wants to appease, affiliate or submit. “No emotion category that has ever been studied has been shown to have a universal or even a prototypic expression, when you consider all the evidence, including the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific methods used,” she says.
If we are misinterpreting what facial movements mean, this surely undermines our ability to read other people, especially people from other cultures. We aren’t just missing a trick: this could have some serious implications. Our assumptions about facial expressions influence everything from how we diagnose and manage some conditions, such as autism, to policy decisions, national security protocols and legal judgements.
Misinterpretations
Imagine, for example, members of a jury watching a defendant charged with assault who scowls in concentration throughout the trial. If that scowling is incorrectly seen as anger or contempt, this could unfairly bias the jury. Or take programmes run by agencies such as the FBI designed to train agents to spot the signs of fear, stress and deception in people’s faces and body movements. Criticisms of some of these methods have led to suggestions that . Indeed, various companies already market technology that promises to identify what an individual is feeling by analysing video images of their face. Barrett and Crivelli believe that software isn’t the answer, however, because this entire approach is flawed.
Many advocates of the idea that our faces express our emotions argue that it isn’t unsound, it just needs expanding. In 2019, Alan Cowen and Dacher Keltner, both at the University of California, Berkeley, published research concluding that signals from the face and body together can of everyday emotions, at least among Western adults. These include things like pride, embarrassment, desire and amusement. Perhaps, they suggest, those judo winners were predominantly feeling pride, which isn’t expressed with a smile. Smiles certainly don’t have to be linked to happiness, says Keltner, but that doesn’t mean they don’t relate to emotions. Many different kinds of smile map onto more specific states, such as amusement, desire, love, interest, awe and sympathy, he argues.
In other words, Cowen, Keltner and their colleagues believe that emotions can be read from the outside, it is just . They would like to see machine-learning and statistical modelling approaches used to map how the emotions in their expanded list are conveyed using combinations of facial expressions, non-verbal vocal signals, such as tone of voice, and contextual signals.
The revisionists are unconvinced. There is no good evidence that any physical movement – whether in the face or body – inherently has any particular psychological meaning, says Barrett.
Both sides agree that context is crucial for understanding what facial movements might indicate. But Barrett wonders how much context is sufficient for reliable judgements. Is it enough to know that someone is at a funeral or in a job interview? Or do you also have to know that they have no strong feelings about the deceased but wouldn’t dream of not looking sad? Or that the lunch they ate before their interview is making the waistband of their trousers painfully tight?
I experienced this for myself while researching this story. To contact Crivelli, I googled page and was struck by his photo. He is tight-lipped with eyes open wide. His expression seems challenging – hostile, even. When I caught up with him, I asked how he was feeling at the time and what, if anything, he was trying to convey. He laughed. “That photo was taken for a visa for the US. I couldn’t smile, and I was probably thinking, let’s hurry up and get this done!” Without this unexpected context, I would have assumed from Crivelli’s face that he was angry or unfriendly. On both counts, I would have been plain wrong.
Poker face?
US psychologist Paul Ekman has argued for the existence of “micro-expressions” that occur when we are fighting to hide our emotions. For instance, someone who is acting calm but actually feeling nervous will betray their anxiety in fleeting but noticeable muscular movements. This “involuntary emotional leakage” exposes a person’s true emotions, . His idea is contested. Nevertheless, if you are with people who believe that our faces reveal our true emotions — and most people do — you could use this to your advantage.
To persuade others that you are genuinely happy, for example, try , in which the orbicularis oculi muscles around the eyes get involved, as well as the zygomaticus major muscles, which raise the corners of the mouth. Contrary to popular belief, a substantial minority of people can consciously do this. In fact, people tend to associate wrinkled up eyes with , not just for happiness but for pain and sadness, too.
What if you want to work out how someone else is feeling? There may be other clues in their face. A team led by Aleix Martinez at Ohio State University has found linked to various emotions, a result, the group believes, of subtle changes in blood flow affecting skin tone and complexion.
Happiness is associated with redness on the cheeks and chin, for example, while disgust is associated with a blue-yellow tinge around the lips and a red-green colour around the nose and forehead. People asked to match faces displaying such patterns to emotional states got it right about 75 per cent of the time. So if you want to judge how other people are feeling, you might do better to ignore their facial contortions and look for these colour clues instead.
