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Emotional Intelligence, Reading Faces, and Meditation

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Published: 19Nov2007
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Concealed emotions, also called facial "microexpressions", are the fleeting expressions that, believe it or not, you make when consciously or unconsciously trying to hide your true emotions. In conscious microexpressions you may be trying to lie, while with unconscious expressions, you may not even be aware of what they are truly feeling.

Paul Ekman, Ph.D. has made a study of these microexpressions. According to Ekman, "These expressions tend to be very extreme and very fast. Eighty to 90 percent of people we tested don't see them."

Ekman was a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco for 32 years. His original focus was on "nonverbal" behavior, and by the mid-60s, he concentrated on the expression and physiology of emotion. He has developed a secondary interest in interpersonal deception as well. Perhaps his most famous publication is the The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) which is used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies everywhere, as well as parents and therapists who want to be able to understand people around them better.

"With my children, spouse, friends and work associates, if I don't understand how they're feeling — either about me or about (things) that may have nothing to do with me when we interact — then I'm not going to have a very useful exchange with them," Ekman said.

He has conducted extensive research on identifying emotions through facial expressions. As part of that research, and as part of the power of discipline and training, he learned how to consciously manipulate 42 facial muscles, including many that in most of us are beyond our control, and even awareness.

In the 60s and 70s when Ekman began looking into the universality of facial expressions, all the major contemporary social scientists, like Margaret Mead, believed that expressions were culturally learned, not innate. He proceeded traveled all over the world with pictures of people making distinct facial expressions and found people in cultures everywhere, from modern to stone age, agreed on the emotion behind the expression. He then turned to studying the production of these expressions and the 43 facial muscles that can create 10,000 expressions, which form the basis of his training.

He found seven universal emotions with unique facial expression. The emotions are: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise, and contempt. At least five of these are shared with non-human primates as well. Interestingly, the smile is the easiest expression to recognize, and the easiest to identify from afar. These emotions have a specific trigger, come quickly without thought, and interact with your physiology - meaning merely making the fear expression will create a fear response in your body as well. With fear, neurons will signal your body to prepare to flee by sending blood to the large voluntary muscles in your legs. In anger, on the other hand, your brain signals your body to fight by sending blood to your hands. Try practicing on yourself: can you feel a change in your emotional state by making changes in your facial expression?

Emotions have distinct triggers and learning those triggers is an important step in understanding your own emotions and why you respond the way you do. To date, the best way to learn to recognize the the impulse that was triggered before the awareness of the emotion is contemplative practice (meditation). Also, an important point to clarify, emotions are not moods, which are longer affective experiences have an unclear trigger (you may not be sure what sparked the mood you're in) and tend to filter your view of the environment.

Based on primary and secondary research, he found that there are seven emotions expressed in the face in universally consistent ways: Sadness, Anger, Surprise, Fear, Enjoyment, Disgust, Contempt.

Even more interesting: according to his research, feelings and facial expressions influence each other. This is, not only a sad person will naturally look sad, but a person who intentionally smiles will feel more content than a person who doesn't.

Now, would you please smile ...

Alvaro Fernandez is the CEO and Co-Founder of SharpBrains.com, which provides the latest science-based information for Cognitive Interventions and Mental Training, and has been recognized by Scientific American Mind, MarketWatch, Forbes, and more. Alvaro holds MA in Education and MBA from Stanford University, and teaches The Science of Brain Health at UC-Berkeley Lifelong Learning Institute. You can learn more at http://www.sharpbrains.com/

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