Ever looked at yourself throughout the day and analyzed your facial expressions? Well, if you haven’t noticed the way you feel is written all over your face all day long! It’s not a bad thing, and don’t try to force yourself 1up on the emotions of others through their “resting face”, were often correct when we infer how they’re feeling. It’s all because of the movements that contract from our muscles that work as an aid to reveal how we feel inside. These are called micro expressions; the brief, involuntary facial expression shown on the face of humans per emotions experienced.
Researchers believed that an individual’s emotional world was inaccessible to scientific inquiry, or not as interesting compared to the means of learning and thinking or the incentives behind human actions. However, most scientists didn’t look at the subject as Ekman did. Ekman was intrigued with the thought of non-verbal communication. His research showed that there is a universal set of facial expressions that can be easily identified. No matter where he went to study expressions, all the results were the same.
Questions like “How many facial expressions do we as the human culture acquire each day”, “Can we read emotions?”, often come up when researching our expressions. Through answering these questions, Ekman created a facial expression dictionary. Ekman and his colleague, Wallace Friesen created and published the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This system makes it possible to describe and identify any facial expression based on the combination of 43 elements that generate more than 10,000 potential combinations. The robotic expression tool kit can reproduce lifelike expressions using the frontal muscles, corrugator muscles, eyelid muscles, zygomatic muscles and lifters, depressor anguli oris, orbicularis oris, depressor labii inferioris, and mentalis.
So, you see, your facial expressions can be easily detected without you even noticing or controlling the feature. Which means the way you’re feeling will most likely be reflected onto your face at least once a day! Its nothing to worry about considering the fact that this noticeable feature comes with all of our faces. Be careful about that mug on your face and try to think happy thoughts!
