Facial Expressions and the Role They Play in Recognizing Emotions
There was a TV show that was broadcast from 2009-2011 called Lie to Me. In this show was a man named Cal Lightman who used his knowledge of body language and facial expressions to read people’s body language. The premise of Lie to Me is based on Paul Ekman and his studies on microexpressions (“Lie to Me”). A microexpression “is a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face of humans according to emotions experienced” (“Microexpression”). All emotions have a connecting facial expression, and humans’ faces involuntarily relay that fact whether they want to or not.
The face has “forty-four independent movements, whose various combinations uniquely describe every facial expression that Homo sapiens are capable of” (Davidson, 2012, p. 32), and there are seven primary facial expressions: Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise and contempt (Pelham, 2015, "The Study of Facial Expressions"). As well, “evolutionary biologists and psychologists …show more content…
While the Botox study saw people with a single frown muscle paralyzed, this study was able to use people who had little to no ability to show expressions – and had been that way their entire life. The current theory when they did this study was that people “recognize facial expressions by mimicking observed expressions, which in turn generates the corresponding emotional experience in the observer” (Bogart, 2009, p. 4). If this was the case, then people who were unable to mimic an expression should have had a difficult time recognizing emotions. Instead, they found that “adults with Moebius syndrome did not show widespread deficits in emotion recognition accuracy [which] shows that facial mimicry and facial feedback are not necessary to recognize facial expression” (Bogart, 2009, p.
There was a TV show that was broadcast from 2009-2011 called Lie to Me. In this show was a man named Cal Lightman who used his knowledge of body language and facial expressions to read people’s body language. The premise of Lie to Me is based on Paul Ekman and his studies on microexpressions (“Lie to Me”). A microexpression “is a brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face of humans according to emotions experienced” (“Microexpression”). All emotions have a connecting facial expression, and humans’ faces involuntarily relay that fact whether they want to or not.
The face has “forty-four independent movements, whose various combinations uniquely describe every facial expression that Homo sapiens are capable of” (Davidson, 2012, p. 32), and there are seven primary facial expressions: Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise and contempt (Pelham, 2015, "The Study of Facial Expressions"). As well, “evolutionary biologists and psychologists …show more content…
While the Botox study saw people with a single frown muscle paralyzed, this study was able to use people who had little to no ability to show expressions – and had been that way their entire life. The current theory when they did this study was that people “recognize facial expressions by mimicking observed expressions, which in turn generates the corresponding emotional experience in the observer” (Bogart, 2009, p. 4). If this was the case, then people who were unable to mimic an expression should have had a difficult time recognizing emotions. Instead, they found that “adults with Moebius syndrome did not show widespread deficits in emotion recognition accuracy [which] shows that facial mimicry and facial feedback are not necessary to recognize facial expression” (Bogart, 2009, p.