Facial expressions communicate essentials

When Tim McCaughan was promoted to assignments editor at CNN's Washington bureau several years ago, a woman congratulated him.

“It's much deserved,” she said.

“How would you know?” he joked.

But she didn't take it as a joke, because his sardonic remark didn't come with a grin. McCaughan has Moebius syndrome, a rare disorder that paralyzes most facial muscles. By the time he realized his mistake, “I remember turning and seeing the back of her head. She of course had taken it that I was a jerk.”

He eventually persuaded her otherwise. Tim and Kristen McCaughan now are married and have two young children.

The incident underscores a fact about our social lives that we usually take for granted: Most of us can make thousands of facial expressions, yielding an enormous amount of information about our feelings.

Evolutionary psychologists say finely tuned expressions may derive from our early ancestors' need to communicate quickly, wordlessly. A grimace might say, “Run! There's a dangerous creature here!” A nose wrinkled in disgust would signal, “Don't eat this. It's rotten!”

Our 44 facial muscles can signal basic emotions and subtle, fleeting blends. Other people briefly mimic them before responding with their own expressions, which we unconsciously mimic before responding, and on and on in a recursive loop.

Nim Tottenham, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, observes “how important faces are to us. If you look in your wallet, you put pictures of your family's faces in it. You don't put in pictures of their hands, even though they're just as identifiable.”

According to one pioneering researcher, we can communicate basic emotional messages no matter what language we speak.

Paul Ekman has promoted the idea of universal facial expressions for more than 50 years. An emeritus professor at UC-San Francisco, he has written several books, including “Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life.”

When he began investigating facial expressions in the 1960s, anthropologists such as Margaret Mead believed that almost all behaviors were socially learned and culturally variable. But when Ekman found that people in different ethnic groups all identified photographs of basic expressions in the same way, he began to suspect they were universal.

Ekman went on to identify six basic universal emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. Later he added a seventh, contempt. Eventually, he created the Facial Action Coding System, analyzing facial muscles and expressions. He found that with a genuine smile, the eyes crinkle when the orbicularis oculi muscles contract. If a person's eyelids don't move, he said, it's likely they're smiling out of politeness, not happiness.

Not everyone believes in universal expressions.

Roberto Caldara, a face researcher at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, has even called it “a big, fat lie.”

He noted that on Ekman's coding system, East Asians score lower than Caucasians when identifying certain expressions. They often confuse fear with surprise and anger with disgust. His studies show that East Asians tend to get most of their emotional information from the eyes, which move similarly in those pairings.

Reading expressions can be challenging, Tottenham said, noting we may perceive emotions that aren't there. Researchers have trouble finding photographs that work as neutral expressions, she said, because we tend to attach emotions to them. They are “the Rorschach of faces.”

Finally, David Matsumoto, a San Francisco State University researcher who worked with Ekman, noted that many expressions have nothing to do with conveying emotions. “They also illustrate or animate our speech,” regulating conversation, he said.

Matsumoto's research also has convinced him that some emotions — disgust and contempt — are more problematic than anger. Anger arises “when we have a goal and it is blocked,” which “is not necessarily good or bad for our relations with others.”

But “contempt ... is an emotion of moral superiority and disgust is an emotion of contamination, and people often want to eliminate a contaminated object,” Matsumoto said. When leaders of ideologically motivated groups “talk with a combination of anger and contempt and disgust ... they're showing their motivation to eliminate others by exhibiting their moral superiority.”

That can lead directly to genocide, which Matsumoto is studying under a grant from the Minerva Initiative, a social sciences program funded by the Department of Defense.

Evidence also suggests that with our expressions, the muscle movements themselves affect emotions.

In 2002, a French researcher found that when he had students hold a pen in their mouths in a way that mimicked a full smile, they rated cartoon clips as much funnier than when they had more neutral expressions.

CNN's McCaughan often coaches correspondents to think about what their expressions convey “so that the viewers get a perception that you're happy to see them — and I think I am more sensitive to that than any of them ever are.”