People make the weirdest faces when they play video games, it’s hilarious to watch. :-)
Lisa Feldman Barrett has a bunch of papers / talks / books / etc. about how facial expressions are difficult to interpret. (I read her book How Emotions Are Made (discussed a bit in my post here), and her article Emotional Expressions Reconsidered) She makes a lot of good points in the “Emotional Expressions Reconsidered” article, but I think she takes them too far...
The article brings up a lot of relevant facts, but the way I would explain them is:
1. Labeled emotional concepts like “happiness” that we use in day-to-day life don’t perfectly correspond to exactly one innate reaction, and vice-versa;
2. Our innate subcortical systems create innate facial expressions, but at the same time, our neocortex can also control our face, and it does so in a way that is learned, culturally-dependent, unreliable, and often deceptive. (Hence Paul Ekman’s focus on trying to read “facial microexpressions” rather than reading facial expressions per se.)
3. Most people (including me) seem to be kinda bad at consciously inferring anything about a person’s inner experience based on even the most straightforward and stereotypical facial expressions. (You might think we have a lifetime of experience, but not really. We have almost no experience with seeing faces out of the context of other body motions and knowledge of the situation, and points #1 and #2 also make for a difficult learning task.)
By contrast, the article’s position seems to be something like “facial expressions are completely arbitrary, not innate at all”. Actually, I don’t think she thinks that exactly, but if not, she doesn’t seem to try very hard to avoid giving that impression.
Meta: I’m obviously shoehorning in an old discarded blog post draft outline into the conversation here :-D
People make the weirdest faces when they play video games, it’s hilarious to watch. :-)
Lisa Feldman Barrett has a bunch of papers / talks / books / etc. about how facial expressions are difficult to interpret. (I read her book How Emotions Are Made (discussed a bit in my post here), and her article Emotional Expressions Reconsidered) She makes a lot of good points in the “Emotional Expressions Reconsidered” article, but I think she takes them too far...
The article brings up a lot of relevant facts, but the way I would explain them is:
1. Labeled emotional concepts like “happiness” that we use in day-to-day life don’t perfectly correspond to exactly one innate reaction, and vice-versa;
2. Our innate subcortical systems create innate facial expressions, but at the same time, our neocortex can also control our face, and it does so in a way that is learned, culturally-dependent, unreliable, and often deceptive. (Hence Paul Ekman’s focus on trying to read “facial microexpressions” rather than reading facial expressions per se.)
3. Most people (including me) seem to be kinda bad at consciously inferring anything about a person’s inner experience based on even the most straightforward and stereotypical facial expressions. (You might think we have a lifetime of experience, but not really. We have almost no experience with seeing faces out of the context of other body motions and knowledge of the situation, and points #1 and #2 also make for a difficult learning task.)
By contrast, the article’s position seems to be something like “facial expressions are completely arbitrary, not innate at all”. Actually, I don’t think she thinks that exactly, but if not, she doesn’t seem to try very hard to avoid giving that impression.
Meta: I’m obviously shoehorning in an old discarded blog post draft outline into the conversation here :-D