Why the Face?
It’s the most distinctive thing you have - your face. No one, unless you’re an identical twin, has your face. We use our faces for countless essential aspects of daily life, many of which we take for granted. This fleshy, ever flexing and distorting collection of bone, muscle, fat, and nerves on the front of our heads allows us to see, speak, eat, smell, breathe, and most importantly express our thoughts and feelings to those around us.
Penny for Your Thoughts?
A person’s face is their most notable aspect. We identify one another by facial features-- the man with blue eyes, the girl with a dimple, the coworker with amazing cheekbones, but we also identify what the people around us are thinking by their faces. Man is a social creature, which is most likely the reason we’ve risen to the top of the food chain. Communication was an essential part of early man’s success, but nonverbal communication would have come along much earlier than spoken language.
Before the caveman “Og” had the ability to tell his caveman neighbor “Grog” to please get out of his cave and stop eating all of his caribou, he would have simply communicated by glaring and scowling. Hopefully, Grog got the message in time. Conversely, Og’s cavewoman wife “Ogette” would have pulled up the corners of her lips and showed her teeth to express gratitude when Og brought home a new pile of pine boughs for them to bed down on.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
In his article entitled “Development of Emotional Facial Recognition in Late Childhood and Adolescence,” writer Mack LeMouse postulates that “when children are born they do not understand language, so facial expressions convey to them how people are feeling.”
As adults, we naturally begin to teach infants how to create and decode facial expressions. Most mothers hold their babies with their left arm. One theory for this is that most people are right-handed, so holding the baby with the left arm allows the right hand to continue doing things. A second theory, however, is that, by holding the baby in the left arm, the left side of the baby’s face is more easily able to observe the face of the person holding it. The baby’s left eye corresponds to its right brain, which is in charge of feelings and symbols. This allows the baby to begin to correlate his mother’s smile with her attitude of happiness.
This is not to say, however, that all facial expressions are learned. In a 1978 study by H. Oster and Paul Ekman, blind infants and infants who could see were given a taste test. When given a sweet substance, all infants smiled and expressed pleasure. When given a bitter substance, all infants grimaced and expressed disgust. This would suggest that pleasure and disgust are two universal, hard-wired facial expressions.
Hey, I Know You!
In 1969, Paul Ekman and W.V. Friesen compiled a list of six universal facial expressions: happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, and fear. These six expressions are considered to be the same around the world, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe. While cultures can differ vastly in customs and rituals, from dinnertime manners to courtship to mourning, all understand the smile and the frown. It’s our faces and the ability to decipher its thousands of brief muscular movements that gives us this awesome power of communication and, strangely enough, makes us all unique and yet the same.
References:
Hager, J. and Ekman, P. Essential Behavioral Science of the Face and Gesture that Computer Scientists Need to Know. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from the World Wide Web.
Hager, J. and Ekman. P. (1983). The Inner and Outer Meanings of Facial Expressions. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from the World Wide Web.
LeMouse, M. Development of Emotional Facial Recognition in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from the World Wide Web.
Stevenson, J. (1998). The Evolution of the Human. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from the World Wide Web.
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