Chương 11: Faces

Face expressions are a communication blast

Face expressions are made for communication. Made for, designed by evolution to project our emotions or intentions to others.

This is a slight, but important distinction, because not all of what we call "non-verbal communication" is literally meant to communicate. Most of it is unintentional, a projection of internal thoughts and feelings. When you know how to read body language you know how to interpret such signs.

But face expressions are a different case, our face is a sort of a drawing board for displaying either true emotion or fake displays to achieve social goals (the polite smile for example). As a result we are very tuned to search and understand faces.

Now let's talk about deceit and the face.

It's only natural that with so much emphasize on the face we learn to mask our emotions or use fake expressions when it's socially required.

We learn to smile politely and hide anger behind a blank face. But masking emotions and faking them isn't the same thing.

It appears that we have two main neural paths that control face expressions - one is voluntary and the other - isn't.

The involuntary path is activated when we feel strong genuine emotions and doesn't require our attention. It's like a preset, ready to show all the right adjustments at the appropriate moments.

The voluntary is activated the same way you activate other muscles in your body, that's why such expression are usually isolated. When you fake a smile - you know consciously to pull the edges of your mouth, but you neglect the eyes, the brows or your nose (other components that appear in a genuine smile).

That's why forcing the display of genuine emotions can be extremely difficult. Acting angry, sad or surprised requires practice and full awareness to how your face features appear and move.

There's of course a more "natural" way to fake emotions, the way actors practice: using their imagination or personal memories of similar events, to awake such feelings in themselves and manipulate them for the scene. This method doesn't focus on the face expression itself, but rather evoke it naturally in response to own thoughts and feelings.