I finally finished reading
What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) edited by Paul Ekman and Erika Rosenberg. I had bought the book over a year ago and read a small portion, then put it aside until recently. The book consists of 22 scientific papers from various researchers in the field and commentary. It is not written for laymen such as myself, but as it was the most expensive book I ever purchased ($41.72 from Amazon), I was determined to read it eventually come hell or high water. Paul Ekman has studied facial emotions for over 30 years, and it is his work that formed the backbone of the recently cancelled (and wonderful) TV series,
Lie to Me (Booo, FOX!). He has written books for popular audiences, and after reading this book chock full of graphs, charts, statistics, and procedural methodologies, I somewhat wish I had started with one of those. That isn't to say that reading the book is an exercise in futility; far from it. There are quite a number of things to be considered within its pages. Here are a few tidbits:
From Chapter 12: "Differentiating Emotion Elicited and Deliberate Emotional Facial Expressions" by Ursula Hess and Robert E. Fleck:
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Indicators of deception that have been reliably detected in the face are pupil dilation, the use of adaptors, and blinking. Gaze, head movements, and smiling, on the other hand, do not appear to distinguish between honest and deceptive messages.
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(Yes, as Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong told us, Smiling Faces Sometimes tell lies, but a smiling face alone is no indicator of either lying or honesty.)
Also from
Chapter 12:
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Ekman and O'Sullivan (1991) assessed the ability to detect smiles that mask a negative expression in people from a variety of professions, such as judges, psychiatrists, and law enforcement personnel, as well as of students. Interestingly, only secret service agents exceeded decoding accuracy around chance level.
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Interesting, especially as most lawyers and law enforcement personnel pride themselves on their ability to detect deception.
From
Chapter 16: "Emotional experience and Expression in Schizophrenia and Depression by Howard Berenbaum and Thomas F. Oltmanns:
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For example, the use of FACS enabled Berenbaum (1992) to find that depressives were less likely to exhibit facial expressions of happiness than nonpsychiatric controls even though they were equally likely to smile. Similarly, the use of FACS enabled Nisenson et al. (1991) to find that schizophrenic and depressed individuals differed from nonpsychiatric controls in the frequency with which they exhibited felt smiles, but not in how frequently they exhibited unfelt smiles.
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In short; don't assume that because your depressed friend is smiling that things are necessarily better.
In speaking of the chances for successful treatment for schizophrenic and psychosomatic patients, Evelyne Steimer-Krause, Rainer Krause, and Gunter Wagner report in
Chapter 17: "Interaction Regulations by Schizophrenic and Psychosomatic Patients":
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The second result was that 50% of treatment outcome could be predicted from facial behavior in the first session, combining the affect distribution of therapist and patient to a measure that we called "dyadic lead affect."
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One of the most interesting aspects of the book dealt briefly with micro-expressions. These are expressions of true emotion that occur involuntarily and are so fleeting that even trained investigators can miss them.
From Chapter 19: "Depression and Suicide Faces" by Michael Heller and Veronique Haynal:
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More recently, Ekman (1985) presented the case study of "Mary." Mary managed to obtain the approbation to leave the hospital by being quite convincing in her lying about her suicide intentions during the interview. This interview was filmed. Later on she admitted the deception. Ekman showed the interview to young psychiatrists and psychologists; most of them were deceived by Mary's behavior-even many of the more experienced clinicians were deceived. In order to evidence the lie, Ekman scanned the film
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for hundreds of hours, going over it again and again, inspecting each gesture and expression in slow motion to uncover any possible clues to deceit. In a moment's pause before replying to her doctor's question about her plans for the future, we saw in slow motion a fleeting facial expression of despair, so quick that we had missed seeing it the first few times we examined the film. Once we had the idea that concealed feelings might be evident in these very brief micro expressions, we searched and found many more, typically covered in an instant by a smile. We also found a micro gesture. When telling the doctor how well she was handling her problems Mary sometimes showed a fragment of a shrug-not the whole thing, just a part of it. She would shrug with just one hand, rotating it a bit. Or her hands would be quiet but there would be a momentary lift of one shoulder. (p. 17)
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I could go on, but suffice it to say that the scope of these papers is very broad, covering such diverse topics as the difference between the way Japanese and American mothers interact with their infant children (using Baby FACS) to facial expressions that are likely to indicate individuals with Type A personalities.
This is a book for specialists. Enter at your own risk.
And by the way, there's been a slight price increase since I bought my copy. The ebook is currently selling at Amazon for $46.36.