Text 6 the face of feeling - facial expressions and production of emotion

The 80 muscles in the face can create more than 7,000 expressions. Facial expressions are so much a part of our lives that it is easy to overlook the fact that the need for them is not immediately obvious. Charles Darwin argued that expressions are adaptive responses necessary for survival. They communicate internal states, signal when danger is near and so on.

In this view the term expression implies the existence of something that must be revealed, a perception, thought or feeling that takes form on the face. Accordingly, emotion is organized in the brain. Once emotion is constructed there, the brain sends signals to the face, which assumes an expression.

It is by no means clear, however, that the experience of emotion necessarily precedes its expression. In fact, recent research suggests

that by providing “feedback” to the brain, facial movements themselves may be tied to the production of emotion.

Psychologists Robert Levenson, Paul Ekman, and Wallace Friesen have analyzed the effect particular expressions have on those physical responses not under voluntary control: heart rate, finger temperature and skin conductivity. The researchers used two methods to study the link between expressions and emotions. One was to have actors and actresses make faces as though they were angry, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted or happy. The researchers did not say, “Look sad.” Instead, without naming emotions, they had the subjects model their faces on archetypes developed by Ekman.

Ekman studied facial expressions in several disparate cultures, mapping the most minute twitches in thousands of expressions. From these he distilled faces that he believes quintessentially and universally portray six emotions: the same six the researchers chose to examine.

The researchers found that when people assumed expressions of anger, fear or sadness their heart rate increased. When they stimulated disgust their heart rate slowed. Finger temperature also responded to particular feelings, rising with anger and decreasing with fear.

“The easiest explanation for this, Levenson says, is a sociobiological one. ” Emotions are often associated with the need to behave in a certain way on very short notice. Anger and fear are associated with either fighting or fleeing, and both activities start the heart pumping. By the same token, situations that provoke anger often require more blood in the hands, which would necessarily raise the temperature in the fingertips.

Levenson and colleagues also had the actors and actresses use their method training to recall emotional memories. When they called up a single emotion it triggered results similar to those observed in people who merely mimicked an expression.

Levenson points out that these results do not support any particular evolutionary model. The fact that heart rate and skin temperature changed when subjects assumed an expression without knowing what emotion they were portraying provides some backing for the “feedback” model. Facial musculature and involuntary physical response may both be so integral a part of emotions that they cannot be uncoupled.