The Myth Of Reading Emotions From Faces

How good do you think you are at figuring out what others are feeling just by looking at their faces? Let's do a quick test. What do you see when you look at my photo below?

You noticed my furrowed brows. Did you think I was a bit tense, maybe annoyed, or even angry?

Now, take a look at the original (uncropped) version of the photo.

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What do you think now? Not so sure I'm angry anymore? When this photo was taken, I was at an HR event; I was engaged in a deep conversation with the person across from me. My furrowed brows were simply an expression of my intense focus, curiosity, and attentive listening at that moment. The face is the exact same; however, when the context (the situation and the environment) changes, the meaning, and the emotion it conveys to you, changes completely.

For years, we have been taught that we can read emotions directly from faces. According to the classical view, every emotion produces a specific pattern of movement on the face. It is as if our faces have fixed keys, much like letters on a keyboard, that produce a single, specific meaning when pressed. When you are happy, you are expected to smile; when you are angry, you are expected to scowl. These movements are said to be part of the fingerprint of their respective emotions. However, the truth is that even after a century of effort, scientific research has failed to reveal a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion. When scientists attached electrodes to a person's face to measure how facial muscles move during an emotional experience, they found immense variety rather than uniformity. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of today's leading neuroscientists and a world-renowned expert on the psychology of emotion, clearly reveals in her book How Emotions Are Made that we cannot accurately translate emotions just by looking at faces, as if we were reading a universal language that everyone knows.

The same face (facial movement) can express different emotions.

Furrowing your brows is certainly an expression of anger, but it is not unique to anger. Its meaning is highly variable depending on the situation you are in. Statistics strikingly support this: when people are angry, they scowl only about 35% of the time. This means that in the remaining 65% of the time, they move their faces in completely different ways. Just like my expression in the photo, we might also furrow our brows when trying to focus on something, when lifting a heavy weight, or when looking at the sun. That is, the same face (facial movement) can express different emotions.

Different faces can also express the same emotion.

Another difficulty in face reading is that the same emotion can have many faces. When we are happy, we laugh out loud, sometimes we cry tears of joy, and sometimes we just smile silently. It truly depends on the situation at that moment. That is, different faces can also express the same emotion.

Think about your own emotional experiences. When you experience an emotion like fear, you might move your face and body in various ways. During a terrifying scene in a horror movie, you might squeeze your eyes shut and clench your fists, or cover your face with your hands. However, if you encounter a threat on the street, you might open your eyes wide to assess the danger better, or you might freeze completely. Fear and other emotions do not exist in a single physical form; variety is the norm. Because of this, accurately guessing what others are feeling is not as easy as we might think.

Let's say you are in an important meeting, and you see your colleague at the other end of the table let out a deep sigh and slam their laptop shut. While you think they are angry and reacting to the decision being discussed, your other colleague sitting next to you thinks they have lost hope in the project and are demoralized. In reality, that person just closed their laptop because the battery died, and they took a deep breath simply due to the physical exhaustion of back-to-back meetings running since the morning.

The accuracy of our guesses about other people's emotions can certainly improve depending on our closeness to the person and how long we have known them. You can guess the emotions of your spouse, your child, or your closest friends with much higher accuracy.

Reading emotions is often experienced as an intuitive sense of knowing. Yet, no matter how real this feels, it doesn't prove that we can accurately read another person's inner world; just as our experience of watching the sun move across the sky does not mean the sun revolves around the Earth.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

People are so confident in their ability to read emotions from faces that judges believe they can determine a defendant's guilt just by looking at their facial expression, and psychologists sometimes make suggestive interventions, believing they know how their clients feel better than the clients themselves do.

This belief affects our critical decisions in daily life; in job interviews, we might reject a highly qualified candidate simply because we didn't see "excitement for the job" on their face at that moment. We dictate our behaviors based on the belief that we can tell if someone likes us or not from their facial expression. In our relationships, reading emotions quickly evolves into reading minds and intentions; we end up heavily judging the other person, missing out on the opportunity for true understanding, and dragging ourselves into destructive conflicts.

When it comes to emotions, using 'Perception Language' is the safest path in communication.

This is exactly why using "Perception Language" instead of "Judgment Language" is the healthiest method in communication. Saying, "It feels to me like you are angry right now," or "I see you've been quiet for a while, is everything okay?" is the safest path in communication.

Don't expect others to read your emotions from your face; put them into words.

Similarly, when it comes to emotions, do not expect the other party to understand you through gestures, attitudes, or hints instead of speaking openly. For example, in the workplace, rather than expecting your colleagues or your team to read your dissatisfaction from your face, you can explain your disappointment by saying, "This outcome disappointed me because I know your potential and I believe you can do much better," thereby initiating a constructive dialogue. Don't expect others to read your emotions from your face; put them into words.

The fingerprints of emotions have been searched for not only on our faces but also deep within the brain, yet they have never been found. Contrary to what the classical view of emotion claims, our emotions are not produced solely in the amygdala, a region labeled as the "emotional brain."

So how does our brain create our emotions? In my next article, we will tackle another great myth of the classical approach: the "Triune Brain" legend. Is the theory, introduced in the 1960s and still used in Emotional Intelligence trainings today, that we have a primitive "reptilian brain" responsible for animalistic instincts, an "emotional brain" above it, and a "rational brain" at the very top trying to control them all, actually true? Or does neuroscience tell us a completely different story about how our minds work?

References: 

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

• LeDoux, J. E. (2015). Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. Penguin Books.

• Pessoa, L. (2013). The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration. MIT Press.