When Emotions Don’t Fit the Baseline – What the Face Offers
When we teach our students to read body language during our course, I often encourage students to ignore the face of the person that they are observing. Why? Because I believe that the face can deceive us more easily than what is shown below the shoulders, and focusing our observation on the body will create a more sound assessment of the meaning of the person’s gestures. Because of social demands placed on us, we often put conscious effort into controlling our face, which may help a person conceal a true emotion from others not trained to identify the discrepancies. That is the problem that most concerns me when reading body language, when it is being controlled consciously.
Through some training I have recently received and some self-research that I have conducted, I have learned a great deal more about the kinesic slips of the face. Paul Ekman, the author of a number of books, specifically Telling Lies, he talks about his research on micro-expressions. What we refer to in our class as kinesic slips he calls leakage, which relates to the true emotion that a person is feeling at that time. Micro-expressions are the way in which these slips are displayed on a person’s face. Micro-expressions offer us a way to observe those unconsciously controlled facials expressions.
Before I go on, though, I do want to make one disclaimer: Micro-expressions are just one more piece to profiling to use, not the only area to focus on. Often times, these expressions are displayed so quickly (1/25th of a second,) that only a person watching a conversation frame by frame on a video will be able to identify them. For the Marine on patrol or a police officer on the street, we will likely miss those expressions displayed for such a short time. However, that is OK. If you go through the training and can identify micro-expressions at that speed, your ability to observe that same emotion, both as a micro-expression and when it is displayed for a longer time period on the face goes up exponentially.
Information contained in this post is referenced from Telling Lies by Paul Ekman
