Scientists unmask face-reading secrets

MUMBAI: We all know that Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium. But did you know that your own face has 43 muscles that can launch 10,000 visible configurations? Of course, not all of them may be good enough to launch a bark or a barge, forget a steamboat.
Still, some 3,000 of these expressions are said be meaningful in the eyes of the beholder, although we use comparatively few words, such as smile, frown, furrow, or squint, to describe the different facial expressions.
Nor should this come as a surprise. For social creatures like human beings, chimps and gorillas, the face is often the first encounter we have with another’s emotions, and facial expressions are the best source of information we have about how another person is feeling.
Then there are micro-expressions, which may last only a twenty-fifth of a second, but which also reveal a person’s true intent. Psychologists have found that microexpressions and the messages they convey become more apparent when slow motion video is used to view them, although trained observers like Paul Ekman can spot them instantly.
Dr Ekman is the director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the University of California, which specialises in the study of facial expression of emotions.
He was the first to show that certain expressions are fundamental to communication in all cultures. What makes our micro-expressions so revealing, Dr Ekman says, is that we are not aware that we are making them: they cross our faces spontaneously and involuntarily. So, the face lies and the face leaks, Dr Ekman told a recent symposium called Emotions Inside Out, organised by the New York Academy of Sciences.
The 68-year-old expert, who can identify the precise muscles used by former US President Bill Clinton when he lied about Monica Lewinsky, is coming out with a book Emotions Revealed next month. In the book, Dr Ekman talks about recent work that has shown that making face—deliberately contracting the muscles that form the universal expressions—generates involuntary changes in the body and the brain, many of which characterise the emotions. What we have discovered is that expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system," he told the BBC recently.
"Facial expressions are not just a display system, but also a way of generating at least a part of emotional experience." Indeed, research has also shown that when we laugh or cry and even when we try to stifle those feelings, our bodies respond with measurable responses in the heart and the brain. There is no single emotion centre in the brain," Dr Richard Davidson of the University Wisconsin said at the New York Academy seminar. "Rather, the seat of emotion stretches across different regions."
Dr Davidson and Dr Ekman were among the American neuroscientists who met the Dalai Lama in India for what The New York Times recently described as a rare rapprochement between modern science and ancient wisdom. On his part, Dr Ekman found that Tibetan Lamas provided a surprise exception to the rule he helped discover, which is that most people, including judges, the police and psychotherapists, are ordinarily no better at reading micro-expressions than someone making a random guess.
Normally, a random guess produces one correct answer in a reading involving six emotions. "Yet, when Dr Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six emotions tested for," the NYT report adds, "and the other scored perfectly on four. And an American teacher of Buddhist meditation got a perfect score of all six, considered quite rare."
Such findings have inspired Dr Ekman, with gentle nudging from the Dalai Lama, to design programme called ‘Cultivating Emotional Balance’ that combines eastern techniques like Vipassana or mindfulness meditation with Western knowledge involving psychology and cognitive science, including techniques of reading micro-expressions to help people better manage their emotions and relationships.
What is more, a pilot project to gauge the synergy and efficacy of such an approach was launched last month in the San Francisco Bay area under the direction of Dr Margaret Kemeny, a professor of behavioural science at the University of California at San Francisco. She will try to measure the effect of mindfulness techniques on the immune system and emotional and social skills in a controlled trial with 120 nurses and teachers.