The Art of Reading Minds

by Henrik Fexeus

  In the play, Othello is convinced that his beloved Desdemona has betrayed him and made out with another guy called Cassio, which makes Othello furious. (Cassio is Othello’s best friend, and the whole thing is actually a lie from the evil Iago—Othello’s other best friend. Seems our Othello isn’t too bright when it comes to picking friends.) Othello is beside himself with jealous rage and threatens to kill Desdemona. Des tells Othello to go ask Cassio, and he’ll find out his suspicions are wrong, but that’s no help, because Othello tells her he’s already killed Cassio. When Desdemona realizes there is no longer any way for her to prove her innocence, she literally fears for her life. Since Othello is stuck in his emotional state, with an extremely selective perception of the world, he interprets her reaction incorrectly. He fails to realize that even an innocent person would react with stress and fear in this kind of situation. And, as the Bard put it, “men in rage strike those that wish them best.” Othello considers her emotional reactions evidence that she actually did have something to hide, so he smothers her with a pillow.

  It’s easy to think of Othello as a brute or a romantic fool, but the truth is that he got caught in the same trap we all do when we’re in a strong emotional state. It is extremely difficult to see yourself and your actions objectively when you are filled up with emotion. It takes a lot of training. For this reason, it is valuable for you to learn to recognize it when people are heading into a negative emotional state, so you can slow it down before it kicks in properly.

  Do you remember I told you how you could lead somebody with your body language to get the person into a better mood? When you alter a person’s emotional state, you are also helping him or her replace that negative selective perception with a more positive one. The negative point of view can be replaced by a more positive outlook, which is a much more useful way to look at yourself and your situation.

  Strong emotions can distort your perceptions of the world. Negative emotions block off potentially positive experiences, and promote forgotten, negative thoughts. Don’t do anything you might regret later on if you’re stuck in a strong emotion. Try to wait until the emotion has passed before you act, even if it’s difficult to do so.

  Unconscious Information

  You can tell when somebody is getting upset or angry, afraid or hostile, even before she actually is, by being observant of her facial expressions. This way, you will know what somebody is about to feel even before she feels it. This is top-level mind reading, so you should be careful about how you handle the information you get. These are things the person you’re talking to hasn’t consciously decided to share with you, and it is information of a personal nature. The mere fact that you have insight into somebody’s emotional life doesn’t automatically constitute an invitation into her most intimate spaces. Simply blurting out what you’ve noticed about the person can be taken as a great intrusion of privacy, and it can completely destroy any rapport you have going. For this reason, it’s often best to let what you see determine the choices you make in your communication, rather than confronting it head on.

  The Seven Samurai

  Seven Universal Emotional Expressions

  When Ekman traveled around the world to study how we express emotions, he found seven basic emotions that we all display in the same way, whether we live in Papua New Guinea or in Springfield, Idaho. The seven basic emotions are:

  Surprise

  Sadness

  Anger

  Fear

  Disgust

  Contempt

  Joy

  Of course, there are more emotions than this group of seven; for instance, “joy” is better understood as a cluster concept consisting of several positive emotions, rather than as a single specific one. But the emotions that aren’t on the list can be expressed in different ways, or triggered by different things, depending on the culture and place we live in. For our present purposes, however, these seven emotions will suffice.

  Ekman performed a systematic analysis of how each emotion affects the facial muscles, that is, how we look when we’re experiencing different emotions. I have used Ekman’s model as the starting point for the images that will follow, and for clarity’s sake I have used full, strong facial expressions. You won’t see this kind of emotional expression much in real life. It is more common for somebody to display only part of an expression, and in a much more subtle way than in the following images. But once you know what to look for, even subtly expressed emotions will be easily detected.

  Subtle changes in the face can reveal which emotion a person is heading into, even before he knows it himself, or even when he’s never aware of it himself at all. But it could also be that he is very well aware of what he is feeling, and is doing everything he can to hide it by displaying a different emotion or none at all. The subtle, unconscious expressions are your clues to what he is really feeling. I will also describe what goes on in your face when you’re trying not to reveal your true emotions.

  Three Kinds of Subtle Expressions

  There are three main classes of subtle emotional facial expressions: slight expressions, partial expressions, and microexpressions.

  A slight expression uses the whole face, but without much intensity. All of the different parts of the face are involved, but the change isn’t very obvious. A slight expression can signal a weak emotion, which can in turn be either weak in general or simply weak at the moment. It might be a strong emotion, which has recently begun and isn’t fully developed yet, or simply a previously strong emotion that is ebbing out. A slight expression can also be the result of a failed attempt to consciously conceal a strong emotion—like when the runner-up on American Idol hugs the winner, trying really hard not to look disappointed.

  A partial expression will only use one or two of the parts of the face required for a complete facial expression. These partial expressions can be strong or slight but will most commonly be slight. A partial expression also signals one of two things: either it is a genuinely weak emotion, because it is not felt strongly or about to go away, or it can be a failed attempt to hide a strong emotion.

  Microexpressions are lightning fast but complete facial expressions that reveal what the person is actually feeling. They can be as brief as a twenty-fifth of a second, and are very difficult to observe consciously. Often they are the results of an interruption. We start exhibiting or feeling fear, notice it, and then try to hide our expressions quickly under a different emotion. But for a brief moment, a complete expression of fear was visible in the whole face. Microexpressions often happen in the middle of other things, like speech, leaning forward, and so on. They are immediately followed by attempts to cover up. Most people don’t notice microexpressions, at least not consciously, but anybody with normal eyesight can see them. All it takes is a little training. Microexpressions always signal a repressed emotion, but the expressions don’t reveal themselves if the repression is conscious or unconscious, or if the repressed emotion conflicts with the consciously expressed one or not.

  The Expression Doesn’t Reveal the Cause

  Finally, remember, when you spot an emotion, you still have no idea what caused it. Othello forgot about this and interpreted what he saw from his own emotional perspective. If you can tell from somebody’s face that she is angry, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s angry at you. She could be angry at herself or simply remembering a previous occasion when she was angry, which has triggered the same emotion now. Remember the nine emotional triggers discussed earlier in this chapter. So, if you’re going to let the emotional expressions you see in others affect your own behavior, you should first make sure you also know the cause of their emotions. The best thing to do is usually to keep quiet about what you’ve seen and keep an eye out for the opportunities this knowledge will offer you. I will go into more detail on how Ekman suggests you approach each specific emotion, but most of these methods involve giving the other person a subtle opening to express how she feels, rather than a direct confrontation, and the emotion
you have noticed is rarely mentioned at all. “I get the impression you might be having some feelings we haven’t spoken about yet, is that right?” Sometimes, however, you shouldn’t comment at all.

  There are three different categories of subtle facial expressions, which can all indicate a conscious attempt to hide a strong emotion. The first two can also indicate an openly displayed but weak emotion, or that an emotion (which may come to grow strong) has only just been triggered.

  1.  Slight expressions: The whole expression is displayed, but with low intensity.

  2.  Partial expressions: Only part of the expression is displayed (the eyebrows, for example).

  3.  Microexpressions: The whole expression is displayed with intensity, but only for an extremely brief moment.

  Neutral

  The picture in this section is of me several years ago, on an ordinary morning in November. That’s what I look like when my face is completely relaxed. All faces look different, and some have properties that can make you think they are expressing an emotion even when they’re not. As you can tell, I have pretty thin lips and a relatively small mouth. The corners of my mouth also have a slight downward curve. This means people who don’t know me can often get the idea that I am angry about something when I am simply relaxed, because thin lips is one of the attributes that reveal anger. For this reason, unless it is completely obvious, you should never believe that someone you’ve just met is in a certain emotional state. It could just be how he or she looks. So, before you can read my emotions, you need to know what I look like when I am relaxed, or you won’t have anything to compare my expressions with.

  Neutral:

  “Oh, look. Another season of The Kardashians.”

  Each of the following seven emotions will be presented with a picture of a complete facial expression in which the emotion is expressed as purely as possible. The expression will, for clarity’s sake, be strong, even though these expressions are seldom this strong in everyday life. The complete expression is then broken down into its various components.

  Surprise

  Surprise is the emotion we feel for the shortest time, so let’s begin there. When are we surprised? When something unexpected happens. When what we think is about to happen suddenly turns out to be something else. We mustn’t have a clue about what is about to happen, because then we wouldn’t be surprised. Surprise only lasts for a few seconds, until we understand what just happened. Then, it turns into another emotion, which is a reaction to the thing that surprised us. At this point, we might say, “What a nice surprise!” But in actual fact, the surprise in itself has no value one way or the other. The joy we feel is what comes after we understand what happened, like an unexpected visitor coming to our house.

  Surprise: complete expression

  “OMG!!!”

  Since surprise occurs when we’re not prepared for it, we basically can never hide it, even if we wanted to. Getting surprised is usually not a problem, unless the object of our surprise was known to us from before, of course.

  Surprise doesn’t occur just when we’re startled and flinch, as we do when we hear loud, unexpected noises, for example. That is simply a physical reflex, which actually looks like the opposite of surprise. We scrunch up our faces and curl up to protect ourselves. When we’re surprised, our faces open up as much as they can. Surprise affects three areas in the face in a distinctive way.

  Surprise: eyebrows and forehead

  The eyebrows are arched up high. More of the skin under the eyebrows will show, and horizontal wrinkles will appear on the forehead of anybody who isn’t rather young. People who already have those wrinkles when relaxed will have deeper, more distinctive wrinkles. If somebody just displays his or her eyebrows the way I do in the picture, without corresponding action in the mouth and eyes, it no longer signals surprise. And if the eyebrows stay in place for a few moments, that means you’re doubting, questioning or feeling astonished at what you’re hearing. It could be a serious expression or not, like in situations where you simply can’t believe what you’ve just been told. As you can see in the picture, my whole face seems to express this kind of questioning attitude, even though the only thing that’s different is the eyebrows. The picture is actually a clever montage of the neutral expression and the total-surprise picture. The eyebrows and forehead are taken from the surprised face, and the rest is from the neutral face you saw earlier. All images on the following few pages are made in the same way, with the neutral image used as the base, and the specific parts of the face added in. As you can see, lots of facial expressions are changed completely (and express completely different emotions) when just one small part of the face changes.

  It also seems as though a person who is asking a question she already knows the answer to, or who is asking a rhetorical question, will tend to accentuate the question by raising her eyebrows. On the other hand, if she doesn’t know the answer, the lowered, contracted eyebrows, which indicate concentration (but are often mistaken for anger), will be displayed. Try it yourself—ask the question “How are we going to solve this?” once with your eyebrows lowered and once with your eyebrows raised. Notice how the question’s undertone changes from one of collaborative problem solving (lowered eyebrows) to a much more confrontational one (raised eyebrows).

  Surprise: eyes

  As you can see in the picture, the eyes are open wide. The upper eyelids are raised, but the lower ones are relaxed. The whites of the eyes, above the iris (the colored membrane that surrounds the pupil) will be visible in many people. Sometimes you can also see the white of the eye below the iris, but this depends on how deeply set the eyes are and on whether the skin under the eyes is stretched out when the mouth is open.

  The wide-open eyes are most often displayed along with either raised eyebrows or an open mouth or both, but they can also occur in isolation. Then they are part of a very brief expression, one of increasing interest, the kind of thing that makes us say “WOW!”

  Surprise: mouth

  When we first become surprised, our jaw literally drops and our mouth opens. How much depends on the strength of the emotion. Surprise comes in varying degrees of intensity, and how surprised somebody is will often be most clearly expressed by the mouth. Eyes and eyebrows always look more or less the same, but the more open somebody’s mouth is, the greater the surprise is. When all you can see is an open mouth, that’s what they call being “dumbstruck.” It could be an unconscious expression of a legitimate emotion, or a conscious signal that is intended to display the emotion.

  When we want to hide our real feelings, we often feign surprise. But real surprise lasts for such a short time, you can’t really use it to cover anything up. The clue that gives away feigned surprise is usually that it lasts for too long. Surprise is the quickest emotion and should only be apparent for a few seconds before passing into a different emotion.

  Sadness

  Sadness or sorrow is one of the longest-lasting emotions. When I use the word “sorrow,” I don’t mean the sort of extreme expression that sometimes finds an outlet at funerals, for instance. All emotions have an extreme form of expression (the extreme form of fear, for instance, is phobia). What I am referring to are the more-commonplace expressions of emotional states.

  Sadness: complete expression

  “You had me at hello.”

  There are many things that can make us unhappy, but it usually happens when we lose something. It could be that we lose our self-confidence after failing at something at work; we could be rejected by a friend or partner; we could have lost a limb in an accident; someone could have died, of course; or perhaps we’ve lost some possession that we’re particularly fond of. We say that we’re feeling low, depressed, sad, disappointed, miserable, helpless, or desperately unhappy. We become passive and withdrawn, which allows us to save our energy and rebuild our strength. But we have a tendency to get sadness and anger mixed up; we become angry with those who have made us unhappy, as a form of defense.

/>   Sadness also has a social function, because a person who displays signs of being sad will often receive help, comfort, and reassurance from others. For some reason, many men absorbed a peculiar tradition when they grew up, that we shouldn’t let anybody see that we are sad. A lot of people will therefore do all they can to conceal their feelings when they’re sad. But this doesn’t mean that they will succeed—they probably won’t, because facial expressions occur involuntarily. They appear even when we don’t want them to. People who are trying to suppress their emotions almost always show visible leakage.

  Sadness: eyebrows, forehead, and upper eyelids

  In its most extreme form, the only sign of sadness or sorrow could be a lack of muscle tension in the face. But most often there will be a reaction in the brow and forehead. The inner parts of the eyebrows are contracted and raised. Note that the whole eyebrow is not pulled up, just the inner end. This is one of the most difficult muscular movements to make consciously. I call it “Woody Allen eyebrows,” because it seems to be a more or less permanent feature on his face.