Recognition of expressions - on the face

Israeli psychological research reveals that body language is more important than facial expression for identifying feelings in extreme situations

When we look at another person, can we tell by their facial expression if they are happy or sad? As trivial as the question seems, a new study led by an Israeli researcher suggests that the answer is negative. The research was done by Dr. Hillel Aviezer from the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University, while he was in post-doctoral training at Princeton in the USA. He showed test groups photographs of tennis players, seconds after they had succeeded or failed at crucial points in the game. Surprisingly, when subjects were shown only the actors' faces, they were unable to identify whether they were expressing happiness or frustration. In contrast, when they were shown body photos of actors, from which the faces were deleted, the subjects identified very successfully whether the actor was smiling or sulking, at a rate similar to the recognition of full photos, in which the subjects saw both the actor's body and his face.

"It's a strange phenomenon," says Aviezer, "we see that in extreme emotional states, the negative and positive facial expressions look very similar. With that, body movements - even subtle movements, such as open or curled fingers - allow us to decipher the person's feelings." . The phenomenon, it turns out, is completely unconscious. When subjects who saw the full pictures were asked how they recognized the actors' feelings, almost all of them answered that they did so by the facial expressions, and not by the body language. There was a wide variety of answers to the question of what in the facial expression made them answer the way they did. "It seems that our brain recognizes the feeling as a whole, and then invents an explanation for itself," explains Aviezer.

Not just sports

In the continuation of the research, Aviezer and his partners, Prof. Alex Todorov and Prof. Jacob Trope, expanded the field of the experiment, and examined more facial expressions in extreme situations. For example, they asked the subjects to compare pictures of the deep sorrow of mourners at funerals, to pictures of happiness incarnate - photographs of parents' faces when their son's soldiers returned from Afghanistan. They also compared pain - the image of a person's face while being stabbed for piercing (piercing a sensitive organ to wear jewelry), and against it extreme pleasure - images of people documenting their faces at the moment of sexual discharge. Here too, it turned out that in the extreme situations, there are no visible differences in the facial expressions between the negative emotion and the positive emotion. "Until now, almost all the experiments that have tested the recognition of facial expressions have made use of standard sets of staged images, the relationship between which and reality is questionable," says Aviezer. "When we decided to leave the laboratory and examine the real situation in the field, we got very interesting results."

awful

The findings, published in the journal Science, open the door to examining the fascinating mechanism that creates our facial expressions, about which relatively little is known. "The findings are also important for understanding situations in which there are difficulties in recognizing facial expressions, such as psychiatric disorders or diseases of the nervous system," explains Aviezer, "and it is possible that they will allow us to help such patients, and teach them more to interpret body language instead of focusing on facial expressions."

The findings are also important for the increasingly developing field of computer facial recognition, which is at the core of advanced security technologies, for locating certain suspects in a large crowd, for example in security camera footage. Also, the findings illustrate the enormous importance of body language, which we are not always aware of, because we attach great importance to facial expressions. This aspect of the research may be particularly important for politicians who these days attack public opinion, and it is possible that their body language transmits - not consciously of course - completely different messages than facial expressions.