Analysis: Facial expressions allow us to observe from the outside the internal states that people around us may experience
Humans are highly social animals and communicate by sending signals back and forth to each other. These signals are the building blocks of our relationships, from which social bonds are made and broken. It has influenced how we prepare for That’s because our genes are coded with instructions to pay attention to the most beneficial part of someone else’s body: the face.
Even before they learn the importance of faces, newborns prefer certain face-like visual patterns. Compared to other possible arrangements, infants prefer to see patterns of three dots when presented in a triangular arrangement with two dots above and one below her . This pattern closely resembles the main features of the eyes and nose on the face. A genetically inherited preference for such patterns means that from early childhood our attention is automatically captured by the faces around us.
Wired’s former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro discusses nonverbal communication methods using facial expressions.
Facial expressions allow us to observe from the outside the internal states that people around us may experience. The sense of internal signals in the body, a process called interoception, provides us with information about our emotional states. For example, if you feel your heart palpitating or your stomach somersaults, it could indicate that you are feeling love or fear.
How can two such conflicting emotions share similar bodily signals? There is no theory that all scientists agree on, but Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotions I offer one interpretation. She suggests learning to apply emotional labels to combinations of signals from the inside of our bodies and the world around us, while considering the goals we are trying to achieve. increase.
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From freedom of thought, this is why you feel the way you feel
Therefore, heartbeat rhythm alone is not enough to distinguish between love and fear. This contextual and complex way we understand our emotions means that our culture and past experiences influence how we interpret what we feel. In social situations, we often have access to the same external information as others, but we can never directly perceive what they are feeling inside. provides an indirect way to
To study emotional expression, psychologists grouped all possible individual facial muscle movements into action units. Emotional expression can therefore be described as the combination, duration, and intensity of these units. For example, sadness can be expressed as a combination of inner brow riser (AU1), brow lower (AU4) and lip corner depressor (AU15). Such classifications have many uses. For example, it can study how emotional expressions differ across cultures, and animators are used to create computer-generated expressions for characters.
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The late Lillian Bridges on face reading and diagnosis, from The Dave Fanning Show at RTÉ 2fm in 2009
But humans are complex creatures, and what you see on your face doesn’t always read the underlying emotions faithfully. Humans can consciously configure appropriate combinations of action units to display emotions to others that they may not actually be experiencing. In fact, social norms encourage us to regulate our emotional expressions in order to behave appropriately. The existence of idioms such as “put on a brave face” indicates a social awareness of our ability to separate what we feel on the inside from what we show on the outside.
Emotes pose a unique problem. They are important stimuli that naturally attract attention in our social environment, but they are sometimes misleading. Motives for resolving emotional ambiguity are often revealed through the creation and discussion of works of art. Although the debate about how both humans and non-human animals similarly express facial emotions dates back to Darwin, the ability to reflect emotions consciously and verbally and express them artistically is certainly unique to humans.
West End Art Collective Research in Galway demonstrates this apparently human ability to consciously look back on our own minds, an ability that psychologists call “metacognition.”in her artwork cellar door, Katherine Fleming paints with an intuitive instinct for the psychological factors at work when reading the emotions of others. Looking at this illustration, we see that a genetically inherited prejudice against face-like patterns calls attention to the face, but instead of meeting normal facial features, it is instead a surreal image of the ocean and a dark staircase. there is.
Her words about the work show the dissociation of emotion as poetry expressed as it is felt. “This work explores the possibility that whatever face you show to the world, what lies underneath can be quite different. I trained myself to make faces and discovered that I could manipulate how others around me perceive them. I’m drawing a scene where you go down to the basement.”
How can you read other people’s emotions if they don’t have a face or you can’t trust their face? Hands are emphasized because of this, and tension and anxiety are often expressed particularly through hands.” Ultimately, the challenge of interpreting emotional expressions can be both an art and a science. Yes, but you can’t avoid both.
The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
