What emotions and thoughts show on our faces?

Our Gemara on Amud Aleph quoted a verse in Yeshaiyahu (3:9) to prove the importance of witnesses seeing an intact face to identify a dead victim. 

הַכָּרַת פְּנֵיהֶם עָנְתָה בָּם

Their sinful behavior was evident on their faces.

Jewish mystical thought and contemporary psychological thought supports the idea that our faces show much about the inner workings of our psyche and soul.

Zohar Shir Hashirim (540) tells us

(שיר השירים א׳:י׳) נָאווּ לְחָיַיִךְ בַּתּוֹרִים, תָּא חֲזֵי, כָּל גְּוָונִין דִּלְגוֹ, וְכָל מַחְשְׁבִין וּרְעוּתִין דְּעָלְמָא דְּאִינוּן גּוֹ לִבָּא, כּוּלְהוּ אִתְחֲזוֹן בְּאַנְפִּין. וּבְאַנְפִּין אִשְׁתְּמוֹדְעָא בַּר נָשׁ מַאן אִיהוּ. אִי עוֹבָדוֹי לְטַב, אִי עוֹבָדוֹי לְבִישׁ. כְּמָה דְאַתְּ אָמֵר, (ישעיהו ג׳:ט׳) הַכָּרַת פְּנֵיהֶם עָנְתָה בָם.

All inner aspects, thoughts and desires that are within the heart can be seen on the face. You can tell who a person really is by looking at their face, if his actions are good or evil. 

It’s important to keep in mind that while a perceptive person can read emotions on a face quite well, and as we soon shall discuss, sometimes subtle hidden emotions as well, that is not the same thing as reading thoughts. Perceptive, intuitive people will notice an emotion, but then they will attribute a thought to match the emotion. This is where it is misleading because they are sure of what they perceive in terms of the emotions but then transfer the same confidence to the thoughts they attach to the emotions. For example, you accuse your child or spouse of something and you read on his or her face anxiety. You conclude, s/he must be lying, because look at how nervous s/he is. But the person might be nervous that you’ll accuse them of lying and that’s what the anxiety is about, and they really are telling the truth. The emotion was read correctly from the expressions on the person’s face, but the attribution as what the person was thinking is projection and guesswork.

The great pioneer researcher in reading expressions on the face was Paul Ekman, who developed a system of decoding muscle positions on the face that seem to be universal representations of emotion. In addition, Ekman’s research showed that emotional expressions can happen in a fraction of a second, betraying repressed emotions that the person wants to hide from others and perhaps even himself. This is what became known as the Facial Action Coding System.

According to Emily Prince (“Facial action coding system”. Prince, Emily B. et al. (2015):

Early in the 1970s, Ekman and others, ran a series of cross-cultural experiments in which participants viewed pictures of posed facial expressions. Researchers showed angry, fearful, disgusted, sad, joyful and contemptuous expressions to people from multiple countries, including a preliterate culture in New Guinea, and found that there was strong agreement about the emotions tied to the expressions, and the social situations in which those expressions might be present. This suggests that these emotions are universally recognizable and consistent across cultures. 

In Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he proposed that smiles that included eye constriction (also known as Duchenne smiles) indexed strong positive emotion. In FACS coding, eye constriction is coded as Action Unit 6, and involves wrinkling around the corners of the eyes and raising of the cheeks. One of Ekman and Friesen’s key findings with FACS has been that smiles indicating genuine enjoyment are more likely to include eye constriction. Self-reported happiness correlates with the amount of time adults spend Duchenne smiling, and in enjoyable situations people are also more likely to have a Duchenne smile. Ekman used these findings to argue that Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles are two discrete emotional expressions, one representing genuine enjoyment and the other a social signal that is unrelated to enjoyment. 

By using FACS, researchers have been able to objectively measure this clinically relevant symptom of depression. In one study, clinically depressed participants were filmed while answering questions about their current feelings of depression. The FACS coders found that the patients who endorsed the strongest feelings of depression were less likely to smile (Action Unit 12) and depress the corners of their lips (Action Unit 15) and more likely to use Action Units associated with suppressing emotional expression (e.g. Action Unit 24, pressing the lips together). They were less openly sharing affect with the interviewer, and instead may have used actions like the lip press to mask their feelings of depression.

There are actually training materials and courses available on the official Ekman Group website ( https://www.paulekman.com/ ) Some other highlights from Ekman’s research:

When someone tries to conceal his or her emotions, leakage of that emotion will often be evident in that person's face.

• The leakage may be limited to one region of the face (a mini or subtle expression), or may be a quick expression flashed across the whole face - known as a micro expression.
• At 1/25th of a second, micro expressions can be difficult to recognize and detect these important clues. Yet with training you can learn to spot them as they occur in real time.

If a person trains himself to notice the nuances, a deeper understanding of hidden emotional process is possible. Here is another area where psychology and mysticism seem to tap into the same ideas but use different words.

Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation

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