nvc: facial expressions

The exercise below is based on research by Ekman and others (1972) into the importance of facial expressions for displaying emotion. It seems that there are seven principal facial expressions, which we are generally quite good at recognizing and which appear to be so universal that even children who have been blind and deaf from birth display them:

These appear to involve configurations of the whole face, though much information is carried by the eyebrows and mouth. The importance of the area around the eyes and mouth is shown by observations which demonstrate that when we examine a photograph of a person's face, we scan the whole face, but concentrate primarily on the eyes and mouth. This is further supported by the use of 'emoticons' or 'smileys' in e-mail, which suggest an emotion simply by showing the eyes (and/or eyebrows) and mouth:
For example, :) or :-), the original smiley, means something like 'I'm happy', but can also mean 'what I have just written was tongue in cheek' or 'only joking'. The opposite of that smiley is :( or :-( You can frown as well |:-| or have an evil grin >:-) or even stick your tongue out :-Q

Facial expressions are essential to the establishment of relationships with others, as was demonstrated by Izard in an infamous experiment in which he severed the facial muscles of a newly born monkey, as a result of which it failed to establish a relationship with its mother.

This simple experiment has been carried out across a wide range of different cultures and strongly suggests that, although of course there are differences in the extent to which different cultures permit the display of various emotions and the different ways they act on those emotions, the emotions themselves are common to all members of our species. The original experiments were conducted by Paul Ekman in the 1960s amongst peoples who had been almost totally isolated from Western culture. They demonstrated that those peoples were able to recognize the facial expressions of Berkely university students accurately and, conversely, that their facial expressions were recognized by Westerners. These results presented such a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of the 'Standard Social Science Model', according to which just about every facet of a human being's behaviour and mental life is the result of 'culture' and 'socialization' that Ekman;'s results were initially met with outrage. According to Pinker (1998 : 366), one anthropologist tried to prevent him speaking on the grounds that his claims were fascist; on another occasion a black activist called him racist for claiming that blacks' facial expressions were no different from whites'.

Face and Personality

The whole question of personality is, to put it mildly, a vexed one. Some would argue that, in these post-modern times, in which we slip and slide between identities, trying them on for size and discarding them as we might discard our clothes when the fashion changes, the notion of a relatively stable personality doesn't make a lot of sense (for further information on this see the sections on self-image and on the decentred subject). Rightly or wrongly, though, most of us probably tend to the folk psychology belief that we do each have a bundle of attributes, characteristics, attitudes, beliefs, which are reasonably compatible with one another and which, taken together, make up our personality (if you would like to investigate personality further, this infobase has several sections on the subject. This belief that certain characteristics are likely to be accompanied by others has been recognized ever since Thorndyke first christened it 'implicit personality theory' in the 1920s. Most of us seem to have a need to characterize other people in personality terms, even if we know little of them and even if our characterization is as vague as 'seems like a nice bloke' or 'seems like a nasty bugger to me'. The question of how we come to attribute certain trait to other people is known as attribution theory and has been the subject of intense investigation for many years. There is little doubt that a person's face is seen as an important source of information about their personality. This is by no means to suggest that we are at all justified in drawing such conclusions from a person's face any more than we are justified in drawing conclusions based on their behaviour on a single occasion (see 'fundamental attribution error'). We might not be justified, we might just be plain daft, but we do it anyway. Secord and others asked subjects to rate the personality of people in photographs. This is what they came up with:

Facial features		Judged as
Structural aspects
	thin lips	conscientious
	thick lips (female)	sexy
	high forehead	intelligent
	dull eyes	not alert
	protruding eyes	excitable
Persistent emotional expressions and their effects
	mouth curvature	friendly, cheerful, easy-going, kind, likeable with a sense of humour, intelligent, well-adjusted
	facial tension	determined, aggressive, quick-tempered, not easy-going
Grooming
	much make-up	feminine, sexy, frivolous (females)
	dark or coarse skin	hostile (males)
	spectacles	intelligent, dependable, industrious

It's fairly easy to see what dangers are lurking behind an assumption that a dark-skinned male is hostile or that a bespectacled child is intelligent - the dangers of stereotyping and of the self-fulfilling prophecy, the latter suggesting that if we perceive someone as intelligent then we will treat them as if they are intelligent and, in due course, they will become intelligent. That might strike you as a bit far-fetched, but it's not too far from what is suggested by Rosenthal's famous investigation.

You can repeat Secord's experiment yourself quite easily - you need only to go down to your local photo booth and set up a simple table of characteristics for people to tick. An even easier observation to conduct is to take a photo of yourself wearing spectacles and a photo without. Then get your friends to go out and ask people to rate the intelligence of the person in the photo. My students invariably found that the one with specs was rated as more intelligent, which is exactly what was found by Argyle and McHenry (1970) whose results showed a difference of 14 points of IQ. Mind you, as you would expect, if people have the opportunity to converse with a spectacles wearer, they will adjust their opinion as appropriate. Nevertheless, it would seem that specs can give you the opportunity to make a positive first impression at least.

Such pigeon-holing on the basis of facial appearance was recently supported by a new study. According to research from the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, quoted in The Guardian in October 1997, baby-faced men are treated differently from men with mature faces. Generally research has tended to show that looks have a considerable effect on women's lives and so these new research results are interesting as they show an effect on men too. DR Diane Berry, who conducted a study of over one hundred students, reported that other people were more likely to be emotionally open with such baby-faced men. They were, however, less likely to control any group they were in. It was perhaps this experience of failure to dominate or lead which led to their being less extrovert or aggressive. Men with mature faces were judged to be leaders and dominant, if rather cold. Other research, according to The Guardian, has shown that baby-faced men charged with deliberate crimes such as burglary or assault are more likely to be acquitted, whereas they are more likely to be found guilty of charges involving negligence or incompetence on their part.

Facial Beauty

What's interesting about this last report, as with the evidence that some facial expressions cross cultural divides, is the suggestion that conceivably there is rather more in our interpretation of faces that is hard-wired than we generally like to think. It seems to be part of the received wisdom of aspects of cultural studies that beauty is a cultural artefact. Indeed, that must almost inevitably be an article of faith of some currents of cultural studies, since it implies that our perception of physical beauty and the importance we attach to it is open to change and can therefore be contested. If we wish to free women in particular from the tyranny of the fashion industries, then we have a greater chance of doing so if our preference for the images projected by those industries is culturally constructed than if it is hard-wired. However, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists are presenting evidence which they claim supports their contention that our cultural preferences are not as culturally determined as they appear to be.

Judith Langlois of the University of Texas in Austin conducted experiments in which she first had adults rate photographs of faces for their attractiveness. She then showed the same photographs to six-month-old infants and discovered that they spent more time looking at those faces rated as attractive by the adults. Similar results were obtained with two-month-old babies. Interestingly, it seems that the more 'average' a face is, the more attractive it will be assessed as. Computer software can be used to average a large number of photographs and the resultant composite is very frequently judged to be highly attractive. Langlois suggests that human beings are born 'cognitive averagers' and that this innate tendency accounts for our notions of physical beauty. Certainly, cultural influences do have a role to play, as is evident from reports of early cross-racial encounters, the Japanese for example reporting that they found the dog-eyes of Western women disturbing and Westerners reporting that the Orientals' slit-eyes were unattractive. Indeed, Langlois's research does not undermine the notion of cultural influences, since the infants are in most cases likely to be performing their cognitive averaging across a single racial type.

The jury is still out on this notion of cognitive averaging. For example, David Perrett of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, argues that some faces which deviate from the average are considered more attractive than the average. From his study which asked visitors to his website to rate the attractiveness of faces, he concludes that the attractiveness of faces can be increased by emphasizing certain features in the direction of the 'hyperfeminine', for example by increasing the apparent fleshiness of the lips, increasing the arch of the eyebrows etc.

Leakage

That exercise will have demonstrated to you that the expression of emotion is an important function of NVC. As we all know, though, not many of us (if any) have total control over our non-verbal communication. As Judy Gahagan's distinction between informative and communicative NVC suggests (go here if you've forgotten it), there is likely to be some betrayal of our emotions, especially at times of stress. Students of NVC refer to such betrayal of emotions as leakage. There will not always be leakage. Experiments in which subjects are asked to scan photographs of people have demonstrated that we tend to pay more attention to faces than to other parts of the body. Thus, we also attend more to our own facial expressions and have more control over them than over other parts of our body. However, someone who has been trained to increase their control (an actor, for example, or certain politicians) will more readily be able to control their facial expressions, their tone of voice and other NVC than the rest of us can.

Leakage tends to occur mostly in the extremities, the hands and feet, which we are less accustomed to paying attention to than we are to our facial expression. Observe the apparently calm and self-confident student giving a presentation to the rest of the class. There comes that dreadful moment when she has to show an overhead projector slide and use a pencil or other pointer to guide her audience through it. As she points to the slide, the slightest trembling of the hands is magnified a hundredfold. Alternatively, the nervous student who adopts a deliberately informal approach is worthy of study. Establishing an informal approach at the outset gives her the opportunity to sit on the table, which means she can sit on those nervously trembling hands. But keep an eye on the constantly swinging legs!

Leakage can also occur in the voice or in an odd 'out-of-synch' feel to the gestures and the verbal message. People may blush or perspire. They may avoid eye contact, with the result that we tend to interpret avoidance of eye-contact as a signal for deceptiveness. On the other hand, almost constant eye-contact may be interpreted as deliberate overcompensation, so may also be interpreted as a signal of deceptiveness. Much depends, as always, on our assessment of the context and of the other person. If we know that they've been away on a lot of those fancy management courses, we may well discount just about all of their nvc as deliberately deceptive. I once had a boss who met almost any even slightly awkward question with prolonged, unblinking eye-contact. As I was the union representative at the time, I took this as an attempt to intimidate me, so stared back, which always became so absurd after a time that I could barely repress my laughter, with the result that when he did eventually say something it was greeted by a broad smile from me. He then became visibly more relaxed, presumably because he thought I was pleased by his reply, only to tense up visibly when my rejoinder made it perfectly clear that I was far from satisfied. A lot of potential there for communication breakdown! When one of my students went to interview him, his question was also met with a prolonged stare. As this student had just come from another college whose principal was open, friendly and accessible, it didn't occur to the student to interpret the stare as an attempt to intimidate. He was in fact just about to spring from his chair and go to the principal's assistance when the principal finally spoke. As the student reported to me after the interview, he thought that the principal was suffering a catatonic fit.

Conflicting messages

Perhaps if you were asked how you interpret, say, a positive message from the face combined with a negative message from the legs, you might say that you average out the two. That might seem reasonable, but in fact the evidence is rather that the positive signal will normally be discounted entirely. Thus our student who makes a show of self-confident informality, but allows her legs to swing nervously back and forth, will in fact be seen not as 'fairly nervous' or 'fairly confident', but as, simply, nervous. We tend to lend more credence to the negative message because we believe it to be one which is beyond the communicator's control and therefore more 'truthful'. Similarly, if there is a conflict between the verbal and non-verbal messages, we will tend to believe that the non-verbal messages more accurately reflect the communicator's emotional state.

Feigning emotions

As we have seen, important uses of nvc are to display and to conceal emotions. Equally important is the need to feign emotions. Of course, we all know that actors can do that; after all, that's what they're paid for. But watch yourself during the course of the day - how often do you pretend to be interested in something you've already been told before (your grandmother's tales of her youth), to be amused by something you find not at all amusing (the sick joke told by one of your friends; all the rest of them laugh so you do as well), to be concerned by something which doesn't concern you. This may strike you as dishonest and you might say you never feign emotions. Well, good for you, I guess, but I should think you make life unnecessarily awkward for yourself. The Royal Family were judged insufficiently caring and compassionate in their reaction to Princess Diana's death. Maybe they would have made life easier for themselves if they had wept publicly. After Louise Woodward was found guilty of murder, a villager in her home village of Elton was slapped and verbally abused for not wearing a yellow ribbon in her support. Certainly an insufficiently enthusiastic display of support for the Fuhrer could have been life-threatening. Whether it is right to succumb to the pressures of such mob rule is, of course, a moral question. In more everyday circumstances I suppose it may also be a question of morality, but most of us find that feigning emotion can oil the wheels of social intercourse. A teacher, for example, covering the same part of the syllabus as last year, will come across the same earnestly presented arguments as last year. She may think they are simply stupid, but it is not to the benefit of the individual student nor of the others in the class to display boredom or anger or short temper. Far from doing harm, it seems to me that feigning interest and displaying patience is likely to have a positive effect.

In this connexion, you should note the interesting observation that people who are asked to display an emotion do actually induce that emotion. That may seem a bit odd, but the evidence is that we monitor our nvc to see how we are feeling. Certainly, there appears to be an element of 'Oh, I'm smiling. I must be happy.' It could well be that the teacher in our example above, through making the effort to be interested, actually does become at least half interested.

Receiver's emotional state

Ultimately, though, as we have repeatedly stressed, whatever signals we send, deliberately or unwittingly (communicatively or informatively in Gahagan's terms), they have to be interpreted by the receiver. All kinds of different factors (such as suggested in Berlo's SMCR Model, for example) come into play in the process of interpretation. Where we are concerned with the expression of emotion, whether feigned or not, the receiver's own emotional state is a crucial factor in determining how our signals are received. Subjects in some experiments have been made to feel angry, sad, happy etc. and then shown some rather vague photographs. Their interpretation of the photographs almost always reflected their current emotional state. Be careful - you can give someone a hearty and friendly slap on the back and find that if they're in an aggressive or angry state your gesture will be interpreted as aggression.

The receiver's emotional state is one of the manay factors we must always bear in mind in attempting to evaluate the meaning of any given message. As Scheflen puts it:

	NVC: facial expressions Please match the descriptions to each of the faces