by Pamela Meyer
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LIESPOTTING TIP
Practice looking for split-second flashes of emotion on a person’s face (known as “facial micro-expressions”). Though brief, they are nearly impossible to squelch, and thus provide reliable clues to what a person is really feeling.
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Film analysis was also a crucial tool for E. A. Haggard and Kenneth S. Isaacs, who studied films of patients in psychoanalysis and broke down the films into frame-by-frame inspections of what they called “micro-movements.” Their report on the study, Micro-momentary Facial Expressions as Indicators of Ego Mechanisms in Psychotherapy, was published in 1966, making Haggard and Isaacs the first social scientists to discuss the phenomenon.
PAUL EKMAN AND THE FORE
But it’s Paul Ekman’s research that has received the most attention over the years. When Ekman first began studying faces in 1965, he hadn’t even read The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. It wasn’t until he met Silvan Tomkins (see Chapter 2) and read his articles on the universality of facial expressions that Ekman began to feel that the subject was worth attention. He traveled to Chile, Argentina, Japan, and Brazil, and found that in each country, people to whom he showed photos of various expressions identified them in the same way.
Still, those were developed countries, where the media might have helped to standardize facial reactions. Ekman therefore decided to make a trip to Papua New Guinea. He chose to study the Fore tribe, an extremely isolated population that had never been exposed to movies, books, magazines, or many visitors. The Fore, he reasoned, couldn’t possibly have preconceived ideas of how another culture might physically express itself.
When Ekman showed tribal members photographs of people with various facial expressions, the Fore interpreted those expressions the same way someone from the West would have. Asked to show researchers how a person might react on hearing good news or when finding a rotting animal corpse, the expressions the Fore used to express joy, disgust, or any other emotion activated the same combination of muscle movements as those used by people in other cultures across the world.8 This evidence appeared to prove that human facial expressions are biologically innate, not culturally determined.
As Ekman and others have pointed out, culture does play itself out on our faces. While feelings themselves are innate, and our facial expression of them is instinctive, the effort a person makes to control his face is very much influenced by his background and upbringing. If you grow up in a culture that believes in masking strong emotion, you’re going to work harder to keep from demonstrating it. If you’re raised where people expect you to vent feelings with energy, you’ll smile, grimace, or cry more readily.
Still, no one can fully control his face. In one experiment, Ekman showed both American and Japanese students graphic films of surgery and accidents; the students saw the films either alone or in groups. Ekman found that the American students showed the same shock and horror whether they were alone or with other students. The Japanese students, on the other hand, kept their faces more impassive when they were in a group than they did when they were alone.9 Schooled to avoid strong emotion, they were more concerned with not revealing their feelings than the American students were.
Early on, Ekman isolated forty-three different facial muscles and their movements. He calculated that various muscle combinations result in more than ten thousand possible human facial expressions, three thousand of which are useful indicators of our feelings. Those three thousand expressions can be categorized into seven basic human emotions, each of which manifest across cultures in the same ways.
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SEE THEM FOR YOURSELF
For a detailed, digitally animated look at how every muscle in the face works, go to http://www.artnatomia.net/uk/artnatomyProgram.html.
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THE SEVEN BASIC HUMAN EMOTIONS AND WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE
Before we move on to examining deceptive faces, we need to review what sincerely expressed feelings look like. You may be thinking, “I know what happiness looks like. It’s a smile. And sadness is a downturned mouth.” Are you sure? “There are many positive emotions signaled by smiling—enjoyment, physical or sensory plea sure, contentment, and amusement, to name just a few. People also smile when they are miserable,” writes Ekman in his book Telling Lies.10 Let’s take a closer look at what a happy emotion, as well as the other basic six, looks like.
Fear
When we feel fear, our eyebrows shoot up, raising our upper eyelids to expose more of our eyes. Our jaw drops open, our lips stretch horizontally, and we pull our chin back. (Many animals express their fear this same way, except for those that don’t have chins to pull back, like rabbits, which pull their ears back instead.)
Sadness
When we’re sad, the corners of our lips pull down, we raise our cheeks in a near-squint, and our upper eyelids droop. Some psychologists believe that a sad face is the “lower intensity” version of a crying face; others believe that there are enough subtle differences that the two should not be considered to be gradations of each other.11 In any case, tears alone don’t necessarily indicate sadness.
Fear: eyebrows up, eyes wide, jaw open, and lips stretched.
Sadness: lip corners pulled down, eyes squinted, upper eyelids droopy.
Disgust
We show disgust by scrunching up the nose and raising our cheeks and upper lip. It’s likely that this expression arose in our ancestors as a response to spoiled or rotten food and to nauseating smells. Over time, it began to appear in response to behavior that was perceived as disgusting.
Disgust: scrunched nose, raised cheeks, raised upper lip.
Happiness: “Duchenne” smile with crow’s-feet and narrowed eyelids.
Happiness
Though it’s easy enough to say “cheese” for a photo, we express happiness with a genuine “Duchenne smile.” This is evoked when involuntary movements cause crow’s-feet and narrowed eyelids at the same time that the corners of the mouth curve up.
Contempt
Unlike the six other basic expressions, contempt is demonstrated asymmetrically: one lip corner is pulled in and back. The chin is sometimes lifted, as if to raise the subject above her companion. There has been much scientific discussion about whether a contemptuous expression is really one of disgust, but the asymmetry appears to distinguish the two.
Surprise
When we’re surprised, our eyebrows rise up, our eyelids widen, and our mouth drops open. With fear, the mouth also opens—but it’s wider and stretched back. Surprise is generally displayed very briefly. It’s quickly replaced by subsequent emotions like happiness:
I can’t believe you planned a surprise party for me!!!!!
or anger:
I…can’t… believe you planned a surprise party for me.…
Anger
Anger displays as pulled-down eyebrows, raised upper eyelids, pulled-up lower lids, and tight, narrowed, pulled-in lips. An angry face often produces a vertical wrinkle between the eyes. Plastic surgeons have been able to use this fact to their advantage; injections of Botox, which erase frown lines between the eyes, are said to make people look “less angry.”12
It doesn’t take much formal training to recognize these basic expressions for what they are. If we see someone jumping up and down with wide-open eyes, his mouth turned up in a tooth-baring smile, we’re not likely to confuse his expression of elation for one of terror or even menace (unless we’ve run into him in the middle of a dark, dangerous forest). Because they’re so easily recognizable, and because many social customs demand that we hide our emotions, we often try to substitute one expression for another. That’s why, though you’re seething after a half hour wait at the post office, you might plaster on a smile as you walk up to the counter. It’s why you might laugh off a friend’s unintentionally cutting remark so as not to show that he’s hurt your feelings.
Contempt: asymmetric; one lip corner pulled back and in.
Surprise: eyebrows
up, eyes wide, mouth open briefly.
Anger: eyebrows down, lips narrowed and pulled in tight.
AN IMPERFECT MASK
What many people don’t realize, however, is how often their real feelings leak out. After all, we can’t see our own faces! Though some people may be more skilled at manipulating their facial muscles than others, no one can control his face completely. The neurological systems that regulate our facial expressions are directly connected to the areas of our brain that process emotion, such as the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. This connection creates what Malcolm Gladwell calls an “involuntary expressive system.”13 A cause and effect take place: When we feel an emotion, our brain sends a message to our face so that we can show that emotion. The process happens so fast that often our face expresses what we feel even before we’re conscious of the feeling. So there’s not much we can do to prevent the emotion from revealing itself unconsciously.
Unconscious expressions are almost impossible for an observer to catch, and certainly impossible to point out to anyone else before they disappear. Even the most intuitive and sharp-eyed observer on the receiving end of a lie can miss tiny camouflaged signs of deceit on a liar’s face. But a camera sees everything. Thanks to film and video, psychologists and other researchers have been given unlimited opportunities to track facial changes as they occur. They can replay interviews and hidden-camera footage of their subjects as many times as they need. This provides them, and us, with a treasure trove of information about the myriad expressions the human face is capable of revealing. Without film, Ekman might not have been able to make his second breakthrough discovery, the one that propelled him into the in-depth study of lie detection.
THEY CALLED HER MARY
After returning from the New Guinea highlands, Ekman presented his findings about the biological genesis and universality of facial expressions to researchers and medical professionals across the country. Ekman also made presentations to therapists working in mental hospitals, who asked him something he had not previously considered: Could the nonverbal behaviors Ekman was analyzing reveal whether a person was lying? The therapists were concerned that mentally ill patients might successfully convince their doctors that they’d made enough progress to be released from the hospital, only to harm themselves as soon as they got the chance.
Ekman was intrigued. He filmed many hours of interviews with psychiatric patients, searching for certain expressions or gestures that might indicate the type and severity of mental disorders. Again, a frame-by-frame analysis was revealing. Ekman noticed that certain patients occasionally displayed fleeting emotions that seemed completely at variance with what they were saying. A subject might assure the interviewer that she felt fine—yet simultaneous with the words, an entirely different expression would cross her face. The only patient who gave him proof that she was hiding something was named Mary. During her interview, she had assured her doctor that she felt fine and requested a weekend pass. Later, though, before receiving the pass, she admitted that she was planning to kill herself. Knowing this, Ekman and his colleagues studied her interview for hours. “In a moment’s pause before replying to her doctor’s question about her plans for the future, we saw in slow motion a fleeting facial expression of despair, so quick that we had missed it the first few times we examined the film. Once we had the idea that concealed feelings might be evidenced in these very brief micro expressions, we searched and found many more, typically covered in an instant by a smile.”14
At about the same time that Ekman conducted his study, a team of Swiss psychologists was interviewing patients at a psychiatric ward in Geneva. Half of these patients had attempted suicide. When the suicidal patients were asked if they still wanted to take their own lives, most of them revealed very brief looks of disgust or contempt—presumably for either their interviewers or for themselves and the lives they perceived as worthless. None of the non-suicidal patients demonstrated these expressions.15
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LIESPOTTING TIP
Watch for asymmetry in a person’s gestures and expressions. Smiles, frowns, and shrugs that are one-sided mask what a person is really feeling. Natural truthful gestures typically occur evenly on both sides.
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Clearly this discovery had therapeutic value. Equally clear was the fact that the study of micro-expressions had huge potential in other areas. With colleagues Wallace Friesen and Joseph Hager, Ekman developed the Facial Action Coding System. The first version was published in 1978, and the manual has been updated regularly since then. Experts at FACS coding become highly sensitized to detecting emotional intensity and to distinguishing the subtlest differences in, for example, a jaw thrust, a jaw clench, and a jaw pulled to the side. They take note of cheek sucking, lip wiping, nostril dilating, tongue bulging, and neck tightening. It’s an extremely detailed and demanding analysis, used primarily by researchers, but also by computer graphics animators and by some psychotherapists and FBI interrogators. It provides the building blocks for the study of the face, and its deceptive expressions, much the same way a mastery of anatomy is necessary for the eventual study of medicine. You don’t, however, need to learn every page of the FACS manual in order to be able to interpret the basic emotional expressions of the face, and the complex ways we try to hide them.
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WORLDWIDE LIES
Lying occurs in every country and in every culture, but the motives for lying vary widely across the globe. So do the ways people justify their lying, their efforts to control facial expressions that might reveal a lie, and their estimation of their own lie spotting abilities. Research on cross-cultural lying has revealed the following interesting facts:
When asked whether lying to protect a group—even if it harmed an individual—was preferable to lying that shielded the individual but injured the group, Chinese children rated group-protecting lies as less harmful than lies that protected a single person, whereas Canadian children ranked the lies in the reverse order. This is perhaps because Canadian culture places a high value on individual rights.16
In some cultures, people focus on their companions’ eyes to read emotion; in others, they watch the mouth. Zeroing in on the eyes is generally more common in countries where controlling emotion is a priority, such as Japan. Because it is easier to control the muscles of the mouth than those of the eyes, the Japanese may be better at detecting false emotion than North Americans, who tend to focus their attention on the mouth. Even Japanese emoticons place more importance on the eyes—the Japanese emoticon for happiness is (^_^) while in North America the same emotion is expressed as:-).17
A study found that observers had more trouble spotting lies when multilingual subjects spoke in their first language versus their second language. The multilingual liars later said that they’d had more difficulty controlling their nonverbal behavior while using their second language than while using their first.18
A seventy-five-nation survey conducted by a professor at Texas Christian University found that the inhabitants of the poorest countries tend to rate their liespotting abilities more highly than do people in more affluent countries. The study also found that among the world’s major religions, Protestants were the most likely to believe they could lie without being caught, more so than Catholics or Muslims.19
Who are the best liars and liespotters? According to the seventy-five-nation study, Turks and Armenians call themselves the best liespotters, saying they can detect lies 70 percent of the time, while Norwegians and Swedes rate themselves the worst spotters. People from Moldova and Botswana top the list of confident liars, believing their lies are detected less than 25 percent of the time, whereas Chileans and Argentines think they get caught about 60 percent of the time. (Americans fall in the middle, saying they can detect roughly half of all lies and that they get away with half of them, too.)20
In another TCU study examining liespotting across cultures, American and Jordanian subjects were videotaped either speaking honestly or telling lies. A second
group of Americans and Jordanians watched the videotapes to assess nonverbal deception leaks. Subjects in the second group were equally skilled at liespotting within their own nationality, but neither nationality could spot deception outside their own culture.21 Interestingly, a similar study using Jordanian and Malaysian subjects found that they were able to liespot outside their own nationality.22
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NINE CLUES TO DECEIT
So far, Paul Ekman’s research has isolated nine facial indicators as reliable clues to deception—which anyone can spot if they know how to look for them.
1. Micro–expressions
Once he knew what to look for on film, Ekman was able to spot the involuntary expressions that can flash across the face in as little as one twenty-fifth of a second. These micro-expressions, as Ekman named them, “leak” the true underlying emotions a subject wants to suppress.
Q: Can you give me a few hours on Saturday? I need to send those proofs on Monday morning.
A: Words: Absolutely! I’m not doing much this weekend anyway.
Microexpression: Anger flashes momentarily as you think, “You bastard!”
Microexpressions are tiny and subtle, but to a trained liespotter—even one with just an hour’s worth of practice—they’re like the warning lights on a train track. Though he doesn’t know it, the subject is flashing a clear signal: “Get ready—a lie is on the way.” Often the subject is not only unaware that his fleeting expression has given him away, but he is also unconscious of the underlying emotion itself.
2. Squelched Expressions
The second facial indicator of deception also occurs when a liar is trying to hide his emotions, but unlike a micro-expression, which unconsciously reveals a single emotion, a squelched expression involves the signaling of multiple emotions, and it’s performed on purpose.