It has happened to all of us at some point in our lives. You procrastinated for too long and didn't get time to do an important project. You've missed a deadline for that newspaper article that was supposed to be on the front page. You forgot your brother’s birthday party. You know that the people that you let down are not going to be happy. They could also possibly be mad. The next time you see them, they don’t immediately call you out on it but you can tell from their faces that they are angry. But how can you tell this? How can you really tell if someone is angry, upset, or happy? The answer is that from a young age, human beings have learned how to tell someone’s emotional being from his or her facial expressions. Now here is the big question. Are facial expressions universal or cultural? In other words, are they do all cultures and people express emotions on their face the same way or does each culture or ethnicity have its distinct characteristics?
Have you ever looked and someone and you thought to yourself, “That person must be having a bad day.” or “Hey, you look really happy!” This happens on an everyday basis. So, what caused you to think this way? What is happening is you are reading their facial expression. These facial expressions are the muscles in our faces that are working together. Human faces are a main component to conveying a person’s emotional state. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. Nonverbal communication is the process of communication through sending and receiving wordless cues between people. There are always key points of the facial expression that would give away which emotion the human is feeling. For example, if someone is caught off guard, they may scream and their eyes may ...
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...see people jumping up and down, going ecstatic. You would instantly know that they were all feeling happy. If you can realize this, you can realize most other situations.
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One famous pioneer in this area is Ekman (1973 in Shiraev & Levy, 2007, 2004) who classified six basic facial expressions as being universal and reflecting most emotional states. They are happy, sad, anger, disgust, surprised and fearful. Ekman (1973) proposed that the universality of emotions allows individuals to empathise with others and enables us to read other’s feelings therefore emotions must serve an adaptive purpose hence supporting the claim that they are universal (Darwin, 1972 in John, Ype, Poortinga, Marshall & Pierre 2002). Moreover, emotions are widely accepted to accompany...
Smiling is associated with happiness, while frowning is associated with being sad. Other emotions have a specific facial movement that corresponds with it. Charles Darwin and William James both felt that facial movements greatly influenced emotions and helped people of various cultures understand one another. The psychologist, Paul Ekman, developed these findings into the Facial Feedback Theory in 1984. According to the theory, the brain interprets facial muscles moving as different types of emotions. An example would be that smiling indicates that one is happy. Ekman didn’t believe the theory one hundred percent until he traveled to observe an isolated group in Papua, New Guinea and discovered that their facial features expressed the emotions that they felt. After his trip, he further developed his theory to what it is now to help understand emotions. Along with the Facial Feedback theory there have been studies to prove if it is correct or not, and whether it should be accepted in the psychological community or not. One of the studies that was done in 2006 used the “pencil in mouth” test, which places a pencil horizontally between someone’s teeth to force their mouth into a smile. After the participants were ready, they’d be shown a picture of a smiling black person, and...
Charles Darwin put forth a point in the 1870 that emotions came into their form because they have modifying features. For instance, disgust emerged because the individual by responding in different ways to this emotion increased his survival rate. The expressions of individuals face are in born, the individual soon identifies the expressions on one’s face to judge whether other person is happy to meet him or not. The different theo...
A set of image recognition tasks was used to investigate the gender differences in the distinguishing of expressed emotions. Evolutionary theory suggests that women would be superior to males in identifying expressed emotion, due to their predisposition as mothers to respond to the non-verbal cues from children which helps to produce securely attached infants (“Attachment promotion” hypothesis). Therefore the hypothesis was used there would be a significant difference between the performance of males and females at identifying the difference between real and fake smiles. The participants were made up of an opportunistic sample and the sample size was made up of 32 individuals. The age range was between 18 years old and 52 years old. Each participant
Your tone of voice can tell someone if you are happy, sad, angry and even nervous. Think on a time when you were a child and you knew by the tone of your mother’s voice when she called you if you were in trouble or if your secret was kept a day longer. Facial expressions can be a tell sign on if you are listening, or angry, happy, irritated and it can tell if there is something you are confused about or if you are comprehending what you are reading or hearing. Body language can tell if you are comfortable, scared, tired, excited, intimidated or defensive to name a few. Some people even say that your body language can give away if you are lying or not.
The face is the reserve of emotion. A smile implies happiness, a frown signifies anger or sadness, and a quick rolling of the eyes indicates someone is annoyed. What one is thinking or feeling can be clearly displayed in one’s facial expressions. Paul Ekman decided to study people’s facial expressions, down to the micro expressions that flash across the face and those are what give one away. He developed the facial action coding system (FACS) after many years of researching how people’s facial expressions reveal their inner emotions (Blink 204). He has even worked with Gottman and his “Love Lab” and the FACS has helped him to predict the longevity of certain relationships. While some people believe that their true feelings are not reflected by their facial expressions, they are unaware that a simple change in emotions is displayed on their face, revealing their true feelings. Emotions simply cannot be hidden, because they are clearly displayed on the face.
Facial expressions have been studied for years and continue to be studied now by researchers. From all the studying that has taken place on facial expressions, there have been two major viewpoints that have spawned. The first viewpoint is emotional expression, this viewpoint says that facial expressions are sporadic and come from raw emotions. The expressions only portray emotion and nothing more. The other is the behavioral ecology viewpoint; this states that the expression is not for just emotion, but the opposite. This viewpoint says that expressions are used or enhanced by the actions and expressions of those around you. This viewpoint states that it is more of a social behavior. I conducted a study that contained 10 observations of other people participating in regular actions. I waited and watched their facial expressions and what may have caused them. From this, I determined which viewpoint their facial expressions aligned with. I plan to compare the results and give some generalizations of my findings. I will also share any interesting things I may have found while observing the people. Then, I will conclude by stating my own personal opinion on the two viewpoints judging by what my results were and what I actually believe.
see the first sign of emotions when "Their face did not move and they did not
In every society nonverbal communication is one of the most powerful tools that a person can use to interpret the message that is being delivered. Even though verbal communication is fairly straightforward, nonverbal communication allows others to sense the true emotions of the person that is expressing them. For example even though a person may say that they are not irritated, their usage of voice may display otherwise. Nonverbal communication not only reveals hidden messages, but it also complements, substitutes, and exaggerates verbal communication.
The authors of Unmasking the Face explain how to identify basic emotions such as fear, anger, happiness, and sadness and talk about how to tell when people try to mask or simulate them. The main point and the theme of this book is to teach you how to recognize different facial expressions and increase your ability to tell when someone is masking or hiding them and develop an awareness of the way your own face reflects your emotions. This book describes what these emotions look like when expressed on the face and what they feel like when you experience them.
“… The photographs of American facial expression were judged more accurately and quickly than were the photographs of Chinese facial expressions. This is likely due to differences in the methods that the researchers used for creating these sets of stimulus materials. Whereas Ekman and Friesen (1976) created their American photographs with the goal of portraying intense versions of prototypical facial expressions that would be highly recognizable, by contrast Wang and Markham (1999) created their Chinese photographs with the goal of eliciting situationally appropriate facial expressions that would be relatively natural. These differences in the method of posing the facial expressions likely led to American expressions that were more intense but less authentic than the Chinese expressions…. These factors likely contributed to the main effects in our study, in which American photographs were generally better recognized than the Chinese photographs” (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003)
Any communication interaction involves two major components in terms of how people are perceived: verbal, or what words are spoken and nonverbal, the cues such as facial expressions, posture, verbal intonations, and other body gestures. Many people believe it is their words that convey the primary messages but it is really their nonverbal cues. The hypothesis for this research paper was: facial expressions directly impact how a person is perceived. A brief literature search confirmed this hypothesis.
While communicating with another human being, one only has to examine the other’s face in order to comprehend what is being said on a much deeper level. It is said that up to 55 percent of a message’s meaning can be derived from facial expression (Subramani, 2010). These facial manipulations allow thoughts to be expressed in ways that are often difficult to articulate verbally, with the face demonstrating “the thoughts of the mind, and the feelings of the heart” (Singla). Many expressions are said to universal, particularly those showing happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and...
...t functions in our everyday life and relationships. Our culture is a good determinant of how we may act and show our feelings around people. The social conventions in our culture also serves as a guide as to what is supposed to be proper behavior when we are playing our social roles in the society we live in. There are times when people would choose to present artificial emotions because of the anxious situations that they are dealing with, hence refusing to disclose their feelings to others. A person’s personality also has huge influence on how they understand and convey expressions; just as our personality shapes our emotions, in turn our emotions also affect our personality. The people that we often socialize with can influence our feelings as we do the same with them. As has been noted, these are all the factors that influence the expression of our emotions.
Richmond, V & McCroskey, J 2011. Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations. 7th ed. Allyn & Bacon.