Facial Non-Verbal Communication and its Most Important Discoveries
Non-verbal communication, which the name itself is pretty self-explanatory, is the communication established between people through sending and receiving wordless signals. There are 7 channels of non-verbal communication: Facial expressions; Gestures; Body posture; Looks and Appearance; Haptics; Proximity; Paralinguistic. We are here to focus specifically on the topic of facial non-verbal communication. According to Dr. Paul Ekman, an American psychologist and professor, pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions, there are 7 basic emotions which can be read through facial expressions, those being anger, surprise, fear, sadness,joy, disgust and contempt.
Figure 1: The Seven Basic Emotions and their Universal Expressions
Two important scientific discoveries were made related to the topic of facial expressions, those being the Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotionand Microexpressions. Those will be the topics of discussion today. The first discovery is arguably the most important contribution made concerning the universality of facial expressions of emotion. First suggested by Darwin in 1872 and later studied by Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth a century later, it was showed that the dominant perspective in psychology was that facial expressions were culture-specific, seeing as every culture has its own language, it would make sense that they had its own facial expressions. In the meanwhile, Friesen’s study in 1972 showed that the same facial expressions were produced instinctively by members of different cultures, reacting to emotion-eliciting films. Further evidences provide support for biological and genetic sources of facial expressions. As an example, when emotions are spontaneously provoked, congenitally blind individuals produce the same facial expressions as sighted individuals. Not only that, the same facial musculature that humans use for emotion signaling is also present in chimpanzees and, the universal facial expressions amongst humans have also been seen in non-human primates.
The discovery of Microexpressions was also of extreme important. Microexpressions, unlike macroexpressions, are expressions that go on and off your face in a fraction of a second, opposed to macroexpressions which typically last between 0.5 to 4 seconds. The study of Microexpressions is conducted through the construction of an RW model in order to compute the probability of frames having micro-expressions, also known as Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. It was first developed by a Swedish anatomist named Carl-Herman Hjortsjö and later adopted by Ekman and Friesen, in 1978. An update to FACS was published by the same authors, in conjunction with Joseph C. Hager, in 2002.
Figure 2: RW Model
Bibliography:
Diogo Ferreira, no.8147
2000diogoferreira@gmail.com
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