Read That Face–Part 1 (In Which I Face the FACS)

This is a story I wrote for the April issue of Men’s Health magazine, about the the art and science of reading human facial expressions.  It’s about 4000 words long, so I’ll put the story up in several parts over the next few days.

 

One weekend not long ago, on Telegraph Avenue, near the University of California at Berkeley, I threaded my way past white people in dreadlocks selling macramé, and a man who was doing crunches on the sidewalk. And I made a point of not looking anybody in the face. Call it self-preservation.

Or maybe it was hypocrisy, because looking at faces was the reason I had come to California in the first place. A few years back, I wrote a chapter in my book The Ape in the Corner Office arguing that facial expressions are the universal language of the human soul. Understanding what they say can determine whether you get the job, close the deal, make friends, win fights, talk her into dinner at your place, charm her pants off, charm her parents, live surrounded by people you love—or die alone listening to an $8-an-hour orderly make rude jokes outside the door.

But it had lately dawned on me that, in my own life, looking at faces was something I generally avoided. So now I was going to swallow my own medicine. I’d signed up for a week-long course in the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, which breaks down the expressions on the human face into a series of muscle movements, called action units, or AUs. The teacher, psychologist Erika Rosenberg, PhD, warned me that she wouldn’t be teaching us how to read emotions. Instead, we would be going back to basics, charting bulges, knots, furrows, wrinkles, stretching, bagging, and pouching of facial flesh—the moving parts of human emotion. It would be like learning how to diagram sentences as a tool for speaking better English. Oh, and there would be homework and quizzes, a terrifying thought since I hadn’t been a student in a classroom in decades. But then Rosenberg added, “Your life is going to change as a result of learning FACS. You will never look at people the same way again.”

And I figured I needed to change, for reasons I blamed partly on harried modern life: Putting on our bland and inoffensive airport faces is how we get from point A to point B (or from Telegraph Avenue to the hotel) with the least possible hassle. But we end up avoiding other people’s facial expressions for roughly the same reason—with the result that most of us are dismal at reading faces. On a standard test, we typically get half the facial expressions wrong, mixing up basic emotions like fear and surprise, or calling it anger when it’s really disgust. Small wonder couples have so much trouble figuring each other out.

Words are part of the problem. They’ve taken over our brains and they distract us from what faces should be telling us. So your girlfriend says “I’m fine,” and you say, “OK, cool,” without noticing the irritated little tightening at one corner of her mouth. Or you give your wife the new Ray LaMontagne CD for her birthday and miss the disappointed way her eyebrows arch up in the middle when she says, “Oh. I love Ray LaMontagne.” In one lie-detection study, patients whose cerebral damage made them less attentive to speech actually became better at reading facial expressions. They picked out the liars 73 percent of the time, an astonishing accuracy rate. Shutting off the words helped them focus on what faces revealed.

Our relative indifference to facial expressions may also in part be a guy thing. British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has argued that autism, with its impaired social skills, is just an exaggerated form of the normal male brain. His controversial argument is that women on average tend to empathize. Men, on the other hand, systematize. We just want to do our jobs and get from morning coffee to bedtime without a lot of emotional chaff. So we ignore facial expressions and end up looking about as sensitive as turnips.

And the solution? Given the choices (have a stroke or stop being a guy), I was hoping a refresher course in facial expressions might just be a better way.