A facial expression is one or more motions or positions of the muscles in the skin. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans, but also occur in most other mammals and some other animal species.
Humans can adopt a facial expression to read as a voluntary action. However, because expressions are closely tied to emotion, they are more often involuntary. It can be nearly impossible to avoid expressions for certain emotions, even when it would be strongly desirable to do so; a person who is trying to avoid insulting an individual he or she finds highly unattractive might nevertheless show a brief expression of disgust before being able to reassume a neutral expression. Microexpressions are one example of this phenomenon. The close link between emotion and expression can also work in the other direction; it has been observed that voluntarily assuming an expression can actually cause the associated emotion (Schnall & Laird, 2003; Soussignan, 2002 as cited in Papa & Bonanno, 2008).
Some expressions can be accurately interpreted even between members of different species- anger and extreme contentment being the primary examples. Others, however, are difficult to interpret even in familiar individuals. For instance, disgust and fear can be tough to tell apart.
Because faces have only a limited range of movement, expressions rely upon fairly minuscule differences in the proportion and relative position of facial features, and reading them requires considerable sensitivity to same. Some faces are often falsely read as expressing some emotion, even when they are neutral, because their proportions naturally resemble those another face would temporarily assume when emoting.
Read more about Facial Expression: Facial Expressions, Universality of Facial Expressions, Universality As Evolutionary Significant, Neural Mechanisms in Recognizing Facial Expressions, Muscles of Facial Expression
Famous quotes containing the words facial and/or expression:
“You must call up every strength you own
And you can rip off the whole facial mask.”
—William Dewitt Snodgrass (b. 1926)
“The psychological umbilical cord is more difficult to cut than the real one. We experience our children as extensions of ourselves, and we feel as though their behavior is an expression of something within us...instead of an expression of something in them. We see in our children our own reflection, and when we don’t like what we see, we feel angry at the reflection.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)