Face is More than a Billboard

FACS stands for Facial Action Coding System and is a 500 page book containing graphically detailed facial expressions. It is written by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen. There is an interesting story behind the making of the book. And profound revelations.

The traditional view of facial expressions till the 1960s was that they were socially conditioned. Paul Ekman learnt from his mentor Silvan Tomkins that expressions on the face are connected to nerves and even genes. Tomkins was capable of mind reading men as well as horses. When

shown the video clips of two tribes “South Fore” and “Kukukuku”, Tomkins was able to accurately tell their traits. Tomkins taught him that there are 43 muscle movements on the face called Action Units, or AUs. And thousands of combinations of two or more muscles. However, 3000 of them are meaningful combinations.

Let's describe a few common expressions. Smile or happiness involves AU 6 (raising the cheek by pulling up the “orbicularis oculi” around the eye) and AU 12 (pulling up the “zygomatic major”, that pulls up the corners of the lips). Fear involves AU 1, 2 and 4 or 1, 2, 4, 5 and 20, with or without 25, 26 or 27. Sadness similarly involves AU 1, 6 and 15. And on the other hand, anger

involves AU 4, 5, 7 and 24.

Ekman and Friesen manipulated and cataloged each AU and each combination. For recalcitrant muscles they would get them electrically stimulated. It took them seven years to finish the book.Today, there are 500 certified users of FACS. There are some interesting findings that Ekman

stumbled upon during the making of the repertoire.

Some expressions are pronounced in some people while subdued in others. Which means people are biologically predisposed to express emotions. Bill Clinton has had a peculiar “hand-in-the-cookie-jar, love-me-mommy-because-I-am-a-rascal” look involving AU 12, 15, 17

and 24 and a rolling of the eyes. Ekman noticed this during one of the TV debates in 1992. He reached out to Clinton’s team and offered to correct it. But they got scared of the implications of him being known to be seeing a “lie expert”. Ekman says, “I guess, he needed to get caught -

and he got caught”.

While recording facial expressions for “sadness” and “anger” session after session, day after day, peculiar things happened. They would feel terrible. When they made angry bird faces, their heart beats shot up by 10-12 beats and hands got hot. Thus, they accidentally learnt that mere expressions can also alter the autonomous nervous system.

A more scientific study was subsequently undertaken in which two groups of volunteers were monitored for anger, sadness and fear. One group was told to relive a particularly stressful

experience. The other group was simply shown how to create the facial expressions that represented the emotions. The second group that was only acting, showed the same physiological responses - heightened heart rate and body temperature - as the first group.

Face is, thus, not the residue of emotion. It is not a one-way-traffic. It is not simply a billboard for our internal feelings. This finding has far-reaching implications. It not only aids in mind-reading and thin-slicing people with precision, it teaches us that we can change our mood by changing

our expressions.

We can even differentiate a genuine from a fake smile (coming from a false friend). A smile involves contraction of the orbicularis oculi (around the eye) resulting in the cheeks getting pulled up and which is an involuntary action along with that of Zygomatic Major. So a fake smile

will involve only the movement of the zygomatic major or the corner of the lips.

(Paraphrased from The Blink by Malcolm Gladwell)