mASF post by "Fatass"
posted on: mASF forum: General Discussion newsgroup, December 12, 2003Stolen from the New Yorker:
August 5, 2002
ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY
The Naked Face
Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them?
1.
Some years ago, John Yarbrough was working patrol for the Los Angeles County
Sheriff's Department. It was about two in the morning. He and his partner were
in the Willowbrook section of South Central Los Angeles, and they pulled over a
sports car. "Dark, nighttime, average stop," Yarbrough recalls. "Patrol for me
was like going hunting. At that time of night in the area I was working, there
was a lot of criminal activity, and hardly anyone had a driver's license.
Almost everyone had something intoxicating in the car. We stopped drunk drivers
all the time. You're hunting for guns or lots of dope, or suspects wanted for
major things. You look at someone and you get an instinctive reaction. And the
longer you've been working the stronger that instinctive reaction is."
Yarbrough was driving, and in a two-man patrol car the procedure is for the
driver to make the approach and the officer on the passenger side to provide
backup. He opened the door and stepped out onto the street, walking toward the
vehicle with his weapon drawn. Suddenly, a man jumped out of the passenger side
and pointed a gun directly at him. The two of them froze, separated by no more
than a few yards. "There was a tree behind him, to his right," Yarbrough
recalls. "He was about seventeen. He had the gun in his right hand. He was on
the curb side. I was on the other side, facing him. It was just a matter of who
was going to shoot first. I remember it clear as day. But for some reason I
didn't shoot him." Yarbrough is an ex-marine with close-cropped graying hair
and a small mustache, and he speaks in measured tones. "Is he a danger? Sure.
He's standing there with a gun, and what person in his right mind does that
facing a uniformed armed policeman? If you looked at it logically, I should
have shot him. But logic had nothing to do with it. Something just didn't feel
right. It was a gut reaction not to shoot— a hunch that at that exact moment he
was not an imminent threat to me." So Yarbrough stopped, and, sure enough, so
did the kid. He pointed a gun at an armed policeman on a dark street in South
Central L.A., and then backed down.
Yarbrough retired last year from the sheriff's department after almost thirty
years, sixteen of which were in homicide. He now lives in western Arizona, in a
small, immaculate house overlooking the Colorado River, with pictures of John
Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, and Dale Earnhardt on the wall. He has
a policeman's watchfulness: while he listens to you, his eyes alight on your
face, and then they follow your hands, if you move them, and the areas to your
immediate left and right— and then back again, in a steady cycle. He grew up in
an affluent household in the San Fernando Valley, the son of two doctors, and
he is intensely analytical: he is the sort to take a problem and break it down,
working it over slowly and patiently in his mind, and the incident in
Willowbrook is one of those problems. Policemen shoot people who point guns
directly at them at two in the morning. But something he saw held him back,
something that ninety-nine people out of a hundred wouldn't have seen.
Many years later, Yarbrough met with a team of psychologists who were
conducting training sessions for law enforcement. They sat beside him in a
darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either
lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape showed
people talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public.
Another featured a series of nurses who were all talking about a nature film
they were supposedly watching, even though some of them were actually watching
grisly documentary footage about burn victims and amputees. It may sound as if
the tests should have been easy, because we all think we can tell whether
someone is lying. But these were not the obvious fibs of a child, or the
prevarications of people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These were
strangers who were motivated to deceive, and the task of spotting the liars
turns out to be fantastically difficult. There is just too much
information—words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth—and it is impossible to
know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together,
and in any case it's all happening so quickly that you can't even follow what
you think you ought to follow. The tests have been given to policemen, customs
officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers
from the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms— people one would have thought would be good at spotting lies. On
average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would have done
just as well if they hadn't watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But
every now and again— roughly one time in a thousand—someone scores off the
charts. A Texas Ranger named David Maxwell did extremely well, for example, as
did an ex-A.T.F. agent named J.J. Newberry, a few therapists, an arbitrator, a
vice cop— and John Yarbrough, which suggests that what happened in Willowbrook
may have been more than a fluke or a lucky guess. Something in our faces
signals whether we're going to shoot, say, or whether we're lying about the
film we just saw. Most of us aren't very good at spotting it. But a handful of
people are virtuosos. What do they see that we miss?
2.
All of us, a thousand times a day, read faces. When someone says "I love you,"
we look into that person's eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meet
someone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that, even though he or she
may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, afterward we say, "I don't
think he liked me," or "I don't think she's very happy." We easily parse
complex distinctions in facial expression. If you saw me grinning, for example,
with my eyes twinkling, you'd say I was amused. But that's not the only way we
interpret a smile. If you saw me nod and smile exaggeratedly, with the corners
of my lips tightened, you would take it that I had been teased and was
responding sarcastically. If I made eye contact with someone, gave a small
smile and then looked down and averted my gaze, you would think I was flirting.
If I followed a remark with an abrupt smile and then nodded, or tilted my head
sideways, you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh, and
wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn't need to hear anything I was saying
in order to reach these conclusions. The face is such an extraordinarily
efficient instrument of communication that there must be rules that govern the
way we interpret facial expressions. But what are those rules? And are they the
same for everyone?
In the nineteen-sixties, a young San Francisco psychologist named Paul Ekman
began to study facial expression, and he discovered that no one knew the
answers to those questions. Ekman went to see Margaret Mead, climbing the
stairs to her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. He had an
idea. What if he travelled around the world to find out whether people from
different cultures agreed on the meaning of different facial expressions? Mead,
he recalls, "looked at me as if I were crazy." Like most social scientists of
her day, she believed that expression was culturally determined— that we simply
used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions. Charles Darwin
had discussed the face in his later writings; in his 1872 book, "The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals," he argued that all mammals show emotion
reliably in their faces. But in the nineteen-sixties academic psychologists
were more interested in motivation and cognition than in emotion or its
expression. Ekman was undaunted; he began travelling to places like Japan,
Brazil, and Argentina, carrying photographs of men and women making a variety
of distinctive faces. Everywhere he went, people agreed on what those
expressions meant. But what if people in the developed world had all picked up
the same cultural rules from watching the same movies and television shows? So
Ekman set out again, this time making his way through the jungles of Papua New
Guinea, to the most remote villages, and he found that the tribesmen there had
no problem interpreting the expressions, either. This may not sound like much
of a breakthrough. But in the scientific climate of the time it was a
revelation. Ekman had established that expressions were the universal products
of evolution. There were fundamental lessons to be learned from the face, if
you knew where to look.
Paul Ekman is now in his sixties. He is clean-shaven, with closely set eyes and
thick, prominent eyebrows, and although he is of medium build, he seems much
larger than he is: there is something stubborn and substantial in his demeanor.
He grew up in Newark, the son of a pediatrician, and entered the University of
Chicago at fifteen. He speaks deliberately: before he laughs, he pauses
slightly, as if waiting for permission. He is the sort to make lists, and
number his arguments. His academic writing has an orderly logic to it; by the
end of an Ekman essay, each stray objection and problem has been gathered up
and catalogued. In the mid-sixties, Ekman set up a lab in a ramshackle
Victorian house at the University of California at San Francisco, where he
holds a professorship. If the face was part of a physiological system, he
reasoned, the system could be learned. He set out to teach himself. He treated
the face as an adventurer would a foreign land, exploring its every crevice and
contour. He assembled a videotape library of people's facial expressions, which
soon filled three rooms in his lab, and studied them to the point where he
could look at a face and pick up a flicker of emotion that might last no more
than a fraction of a second. Ekman created the lying tests. He filmed the
nurses talking about the movie they were watching and the movie they weren't
watching. Working with Maureen O'Sullivan, a psychologist from the University
of San Francisco, and other colleagues, he located people who had a reputation
for being uncannily perceptive, and put them to the test, and that's how
Yarbrough and the other high-scorers were identified. O'Sullivan and Ekman call
this study of gifted face readers the Diogenes Project, after the Greek
philosopher of antiquity who used to wander around Athens with a lantern,
peering into people's faces as he searched for an honest man. Ekman has taken
the most vaporous of sensations— the hunch you have about someone else— and
sought to give them definition. Most of us don't trust our hunches, because we
don't know where they came from. We think they can't be explained. But what if
they can?
3.
Paul Ekman got his start in the face-reading business because of a man named
Silvan Tomkins, and Silvan Tomkins may have been the best face reader there
ever was. Tomkins was from Philadelphia, the son of a dentist from Russia. He
was short, and slightly thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair
and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses. He taught psychology at Princeton and
Rutgers, and was the author of "Affect, Imagery, Consciousness," a four-volume
work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood
it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought
it was brilliant. He was a legendary talker. At the end of a cocktail party,
fifteen people would sit, rapt, at Tomkins's feet, and someone would say, "One
more question!" and they would all sit there for another hour and a half, as
Tomkins held forth on, say, comic books, a television sitcom, the biology of
emotion, his problem with Kant, and his enthusiasm for the latest fad diets,
all enfolded into one extended riff. During the Depression, in the midst of his
doctoral studies at Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a horse-racing
syndicate, and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan's Upper
East Side. At the track, where he sat in the stands for hours, staring at the
horses through binoculars, he was known as the Professor. "He had a system for
predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him,
based on their emotional relationship," Ekman said. If a male horse, for
instance, had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be ruined if
he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup. (Or something like
that— no one really knew for certain.) Tomkins felt that emotion was the code
to life, and that with enough attention to particulars the code could be
cracked. He thought this about the horses, and, more important, he thought this
about the human face.
Tomkins, it was said, could walk into a post office, go over to the "Wanted"
posters, and, just by looking at mug shots, tell you what crimes the various
fugitives had committed. "He would watch the show "To Tell the Truth,' and
without fault he could always pick the person who was lying and who his
confederates were," his son, Mark, recalls. "He actually wrote the producer at
one point to say it was too easy, and the man invited him to come to New York,
go backstage, and show his stuff." Virginia Demos, who teaches psychology at
Harvard, recalls having long conversations with Tomkins. "We would sit and talk
on the phone, and he would turn the sound down as Jesse Jackson was talking to
Michael Dukakis, at the Democratic National Convention. And he would read the
faces and give his predictions on what would happen. It was profound."
Ekman's most memorable encounter with Tomkins took place in the late sixties.
Ekman had just tracked down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot
by the virologist Carleton Gajdusek in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea.
Some of the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore, who were a peaceful
and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, who were hostile and
murderous and who had a homosexual ritual where pre-adolescent boys were
required to serve as courtesans for the male elders of the tribe. Ekman was
still working on the problem of whether human facial expressions were
universal, and the Gajdusek film was invaluable. For six months, Ekman and his
collaborator, Wallace Friesen, sorted through the footage. They cut extraneous
scenes, focussing just on closeups of the faces of the tribesmen, and when the
editing was finished Ekman called in Tomkins.
The two men, protégé and mentor, sat at the back of the room, as faces
flickered across the screen. Ekman had told Tomkins nothing about the tribes
involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on
intently, peering through his glasses. At the end, he went up to the screen and
pointed to the faces of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very
indulgent, very peaceful," he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the
Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to
suggest homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot
get over what Tomkins did. "My God! I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on
earth are you doing that?' " Ekman recalls. "And he went up to the screen and,
while we played the film backward, in slow motion, he pointed out the
particular bulges and wrinkles in the face that he was using to make his
judgment. That's when I realized, "I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold
mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he
could see it, maybe everyone else could, too."
Ekman and Friesen decided that they needed to create a taxonomy of facial
expressions, so day after day they sat across from each other and began to make
every conceivable face they could. Soon, though, they realized that their
efforts weren't enough. "I met an anthropologist, Wade Seaford, told him what I
was doing, and he said, 'Do you have this movement?'" —and here Ekman
contracted what's called the triangularis, which is the muscle that depresses
the corners of the lips, forming an arc of distaste— "and it wasn't in my
system, because I had never seen it before. I had built a system not on what
the face can do but on what I had seen. I was devastated. So I came back and
said, 'I've got to learn the anatomy.' " Friesen and Ekman then combed through
medical textbooks that outlined each of the facial muscles, and identified
every distinct muscular movement that the face could make. There were
forty-three such movements. Ekman and Friesen called them "action units." Then
they sat across from each other again, and began manipulating each action unit
in turn, first locating the muscle in their mind and then concentrating on
isolating it, watching each other closely as they did, checking their movements
in a mirror, making notes of how the wrinkle patterns on their faces would
change with each muscle movement, and videotaping the movement for their
records. On the few occasions when they couldn't make a particular movement,
they went next door to the U.C.S.F. anatomy department, where a surgeon they
knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant
muscle. "That wasn't pleasant at all," Ekman recalls. When each of those action
units had been mastered, Ekman and Friesen began working action units in
combination, layering one movement on top of another. The entire process took
seven years. "There are three hundred combinations of two muscles," Ekman says.
"If you add in a third, you get over four thousand. We took it up to five
muscles, which is over ten thousand visible facial configurations." Most of
those ten thousand facial expressions don't mean anything, of course. They are
the kind of nonsense faces that children make. But, by working through each
action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesen identified about three thousand that
did seem to mean something, until they had catalogued the essential repertoire
of human emotion.
4.
On a recent afternoon, Ekman sat in his office at U.C.S.F., in what is known as
the Human Interaction Laboratory, a standard academic's lair of books and
files, with photographs of his two heroes, Tomkins and Darwin, on the wall. He
leaned forward slightly, placing his hands on his knees, and began running
through the action-unit configurations he had learned so long ago. "Everybody
can do action unit four," he began. He lowered his brow, using his depressor
glabellae, depressor supercilli, and corrugator. "Almost everyone can do A.U.
nine." He wrinkled his nose, using his levator labii superioris, alaeque nasi.
"Everybody can do five." He contracted his levator palpebrae superioris,
raising his upper eyelid.
I was trying to follow along with him, and he looked up at me. "You've got a
very good five," he said generously. "The more deeply set your eyes are, the
harder it is to see the five. Then there's seven." He squinted. "Twelve." He
flashed a smile, activating the zygomatic major. The inner parts of his
eyebrows shot up. "That's A.U. one— distress, anguish." Then he used his
frontalis, pars lateralis, to raise the outer half of his eyebrows. "That's
A.U. two. It's also very hard, but it's worthless. It's not part of anything
except Kabuki theatre. Twenty-three is one of my favorites. It's the narrowing
of the red margin of the lips. Very reliable anger sign. It's very hard to do
voluntarily." He narrowed his lips. "Moving one ear at a time is still the
hardest thing to do. I have to really concentrate. It takes everything I've
got." He laughed. "This is something my daughter always wanted me to do for her
friends. Here we go." He wiggled his left ear, then his right ear. Ekman does
not appear to have a particularly expressive face. He has the demeanor of a
psychoanalyst, watchful and impassive, and his ability to transform his face so
easily and quickly was astonishing. "There is one I can't do," he went on.
"It's A.U. thirty-nine. Fortunately, one of my postdocs can do it. A.U.
thirty-eight is dilating the nostrils. Thirty-nine is the opposite. It's the
muscle that pulls them down." He shook his head and looked at me again. "Oooh!
You've got a fantastic thirty-nine. That's one of the best I've ever seen. It's
genetic. There should be other members of your family who have this heretofore
unknown talent. You've got it, you've got it." He laughed again. "You're in a
position to flash it at people. See, you should try that in a singles bar!"
Ekman then began to layer one action unit on top of another, in order to
compose the more complicated facial expressions that we generally recognize as
emotions. Happiness, for instance, is essentially A.U. six and twelve—
contracting the muscles that raise the cheek (orbicularis oculi, pars
orbitalis) in combination with the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners
of the lips. Fear is A.U. one, two and four, or, more fully, one, two, four,
five, and twenty, with or without action units twenty-five, twenty-six, or
twenty-seven. That is: the inner brow raiser (frontalis, pars medialis) plus
the outer brow raiser (frontalis, pars lateralis) plus the brow-lowering
depressor supercilli plus the levator palpebrae superioris (which raises the
upper lid), plus the risorius (which stretches the lips), the parting of the
lips (depressor labii), and the masseter (which drops the jaw). Disgust? That's
mostly A.U. nine, the wrinkling of the nose (levator labii superioris, alaeque
nasi), but it can sometimes be ten, and in either case may be combined with
A.U. fifteen or sixteen or seventeen.
Ekman and Friesen ultimately assembled all these combinations—and the rules for
reading and interpreting them— into the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS,
and wrote them up in a five-hundred-page binder. It is a strangely riveting
document, full of details like the possible movements of the lips (elongate,
de-elongate, narrow, widen, flatten, protrude, tighten and stretch); the four
different changes of the skin between the eyes and the cheeks (bulges, bags,
pouches, and lines); or the critical distinctions between infraorbital furrows
and the nasolabial furrow. Researchers have employed the system to study
everything from schizophrenia to heart disease; it has even been put to use by
computer animators at Pixar ("Toy Story"), andat DreamWorks ("Shrek"). FACS
takes weeks to master in its entirety, and only five hundred people around the
world have been certified to use it in research. But for those who have, the
experience of looking at others is forever changed. They learn to read the face
the way that people like John Yarbrough did intuitively. Ekman compares it to
the way you start to hear a symphony once you've been trained to read music: an
experience that used to wash over you becomes particularized and nuanced.
Ekman recalls the first time he saw Bill Clinton, during the 1992 Democratic
primaries. "I was watching his facial expressions, and I said to my wife, 'This
is Peck's Bad Boy,' " Ekman says. "This is a guy who wants to be caught with
his hand in the cookie jar, and have us love him for it anyway. There was this
expression that's one of his favorites. It's that hand-in-the-cookie-jar,
love-me-Mommy-because-I'm-a-rascal look. It's A.U. twelve, fifteen, seventeen,
and twenty-four, with an eye roll." Ekman paused, then reconstructed that
particular sequence of expressions on his face. He contracted his zygomatic
major, A.U. twelve, in a classic smile, then tugged the corners of his lips
down with his triangularis, A.U. fifteen. He flexed the mentalis, A.U.
seventeen, which raises the chin, slightly pressed his lips together in A.U.
twenty-four, and finally rolled his eyes—and it was as if Slick Willie himself
were suddenly in the room. "I knew someone who was on his communications staff.
So I contacted him. I said, 'Look, Clinton's got this way of rolling his eyes
along with a certain expression, and what it conveys is "I'm a bad boy." I
don't think it's a good thing. I could teach him how not to do that in two to
three hours.' And he said, 'Well, we can't take the risk that he's known to be
seeing an expert on lying.' I think it's a great tragedy, because . . ."
Ekman's voice trailed off. It was clear that he rather liked Clinton, and that
he wanted Clinton's trademark expression to have been no more than a
meaningless facial tic. Ekman shrugged. "Unfortunately, I guess, he needed to
get caught—and he got caught."
5.
Early in his career, Paul Ekman filmed forty psychiatric patients, including a
woman named Mary, a forty-two-year-old housewife. She had attempted suicide
three times, and survived the last attempt—an overdose of pills—only because
someone found her in time and rushed her to the hospital. Her children had left
home and her husband was inattentive, and she was depressed. When she first
went to the hospital, she simply sat and cried, but she seemed to respond well
to therapy. After three weeks, she told her doctor that she was feeling much
better and wanted a weekend pass to see her family. The doctor agreed, but just
before Mary was to leave the hospital she confessed that the real reason she
wanted to go on weekend leave was so that she could make another suicide
attempt. Several years later, a group of young psychiatrists asked Ekman how
they could tell when suicidal patients were lying. He didn't know, but,
remembering Mary, he decided to try to find out. If the face really was a
reliable guide to emotion, shouldn't he be able to look back on the film and
tell that she was lying? Ekman and Friesen began to analyze the film for clues.
They played it over and over for dozens of hours, examining in slow motion
every gesture and expression. Finally, they saw it. As Mary's doctor asked her
about her plans for the future, a look of utter despair flashed across her face
so quickly that it was almost imperceptible.
Ekman calls that kind of fleeting look a "microexpression," and one cannot
understand why John Yarbrough did what he did on that night in South Central
without also understanding the particular role and significance of
microexpressions. Many facial expressions can be made voluntarily. If I' m
trying to look stern as I give you a tongue-lashing, I'll have no difficulty
doing so, and you' ll have no difficulty interpreting my glare. But our faces
are also governed by a separate, involuntary system. We know this because
stroke victims who suffer damage to what is known as the pyramidal neural
system will laugh at a joke, but they cannot smile if you ask them to. At the
same time, patients with damage to another part of the brain have the opposite
problem. They can smile on demand, but if you tell them a joke they can't
laugh. Similarly, few of us can voluntarily do A.U. one, the sadness sign. (A
notable exception, Ekman points out, is Woody Allen, who uses his frontalis,
pars medialis, to create his trademark look of comic distress.) Yet we raise
our inner eyebrows all the time, without thinking, when we are unhappy. Watch a
baby just as he or she starts to cry, and you'll often see the frontalis, pars
medialis, shoot up, as if it were on a string.
Perhaps the most famous involuntary expression is what Ekman has dubbed the
Duchenne smile, in honor of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Guillaume
Duchenne, who first attempted to document the workings of the muscles of the
face with the camera. If I ask you to smile, you' ll flex your zygomatic major.
By contrast, if you smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion,
you' ll not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi,
pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye. It is almost
impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis, on demand, and it
is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at something
genuinely pleasurable. This kind of smile "does not obey the will," Duchenne
wrote. "Its absence unmasks the false friend." When we experience a basic
emotion, a corresponding message is automatically sent to the muscles of the
face. That message may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second, or
be detectable only if you attached electrical sensors to the face, but It's
always there. Silvan Tomkins once began a lecture by bellowing, "The face is
like the penis!" and this is what he meant—that the face has, to a large
extent, a mind of its own. This doesn't mean we have no control over our faces.
We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary
responses. But, often, some little part of that suppressed emotion—the sense
that I' m really unhappy, even though I deny it—leaks out. Our voluntary
expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our
involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the
way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.
"You must have had the experience where somebody comments on your expression
and you didn't know you were making it,"Ekman says. "Somebody tells you, "What
are you getting upset about?' "Why are you smirking?' You can hear your voice,
but you can't see your face. If we knew what was on our face, we would be
better at concealing it. But that wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Imagine
if there were a switch that all of us had, to turn off the expressions on our
face at will. If babies had that switch, we wouldn't know what they were
feeling. They' d be in trouble. You could make an argument, if you wanted to,
that the system evolved so that parents would be able to take care of kids. Or
imagine if you were married to someone with a switch? It would be impossible. I
don't think mating and infatuation and friendships and closeness would occur if
our faces didn't work that way."
Ekman slipped a tape taken from the O.J. Simpson trial into the VCR. It was of
Kato Kaelin, Simpson's shaggy-haired house guest, being examined by Marcia
Clark, one of the prosecutors in the case. Kaelin sits in the witness box, with
his trademark vacant look. Clark asks a hostile question. Kaelin leans forward
and answers softly. "Did you see that?" Ekman asked me. I saw nothing, just
Kato being Kato— harmless and passive. Ekman stopped the tape, rewound it, and
played it back in slow motion. On the screen, Kaelin moved forward to answer
the question, and in that fraction of a second his face was utterly
transformed. His nose wrinkled, as he flexed his levator labii superioris,
alaeque nasi. His teeth were bared, his brows lowered. "It was almost totally
A.U. nine," Ekman said. "It's disgust, with anger there as well, and the clue
to that is that when your eyebrows go down, typically your eyes are not as open
as they are here. The raised upper eyelid is a component of anger, not disgust.
It's very quick." Ekman stopped the tape and played it again, peering at the
screen. "You know, he looks like a snarling dog."
Ekman said that there was nothing magical about his ability to pick up an
emotion that fleeting. It was simply a matter of practice. "I could show you
forty examples, and you could pick it up. I have a training tape, and people
love it. They start it, and they can't see any of these expressions.
Thirty-five minutes later, they can see them all. What that says is that this
is an accessible skill."
Ekman showed another clip, this one from a press conference given by Kim Philby
in 1955. Philby had not yet been revealed as a Soviet spy, but two of his
colleagues, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, had just defected to the Soviet
Union. Philby is wearing a dark suit and a white shirt. His hair is straight
and parted to the left. His face has the hauteur of privilege.
"Mr. Philby," he is asked. "Mr. Macmillan, the foreign secretary, said there
was no evidence that you were the so-called third man who allegedly tipped off
Burgess and Maclean. Are you satisfied with that clearance that he gave you?"
Philby answers confidently, in the plummy tones of the English upper class.
"Yes, I am."
"Well, if there was a third man, were you in fact the third man?"
"No," Philby says, just as forcefully. "I was not."
Ekman rewound the tape, and replayed it in slow motion. "Look at this," he
said, pointing to the screen. "Twice, after being asked serious questions about
whether he's committed treason, he's going to smirk. He looks like the cat who
ate the canary." The expression was too brief to see normally. But at quarter
speed it was painted on his face—the lips pressed together in a look of pure
smugness. "He's enjoying himself, isn't he?" Ekman went on. "I call this—duping
delight— the thrill you get from fooling other people." Ekman started the VCR
up again. "There's another thing he does." On the screen, Philby was answering
another question. "In the second place, the Burgess-Maclean affair has raised
issues of great"— he pauses— "delicacy." Ekman went back to the pause, and
froze the tape. "Here it is,"he said. "A very subtle microexpression of
distress or unhappiness. It's only in the eyebrows— in fact, just in one
eyebrow." Sure enough, Philby's right inner eyebrow was raised in an
unmistakable A.U. one. "It's very brief," Ekman said. "He's not doing it
voluntarily. And it totally contradicts all his confidence and assertiveness.
It comes when he's talking about Burgess and Maclean, whom he had tipped off.
It's a hot spot that suggests, 'You shouldn't trust what you hear.' "
A decade ago, Ekman joined forces with J. J. Newberry—the ex-A.T.F. agent who
is one of the high-scorers in the Diogenes Project— to put together a program
for educating law-enforcement officials around the world in the techniques of
interviewing and lie detection. In recent months, they have flown to
Washington, D.C., to assist the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in counter-terrorism
training. At the same time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has asked Ekman and his former student Mark Frank, now at Rutgers, to
develop experimental scenarios for studying deception that would be relevant to
counter-terrorism. The objective is to teach people to look for discrepancies
between what is said and what is signalled—to pick up on the difference between
Philby's crisp denials and his fleeting anguish. It's a completely different
approach from the shouting cop we see on TV and in the movies, who threatens
the suspect and sweeps all of the papers and coffee cups off the battered desk.
The Hollywood interrogation is an exercise in intimidation, and its point is to
force the suspect to tell you what you need to know. It does not take much to
see the limitations of this strategy. It depends for its success on the
coöperation of the suspect—when, of course, the suspect's involuntary
communication may be just as critical. And it privileges the voice over the
face, when the voice and the face are equally significant channels in the same
system.
Ekman received his most memorable lesson in this truth when he and Friesen
first began working on expressions of anger and distress. "It was weeks before
one of us finally admitted feeling terrible after a session where we' d been
making one of those faces all day," Friesen says. "Then the other realized that
he'd been feeling poorly, too, so we began to keep track." They then went back
and began monitoring their body during particular facial movements. "Say you do
A.U. one, raising the inner eyebrows, and six, raising the cheeks, and fifteen,
the lowering of the corner of the lips," Ekman said, and then did all three.
"What we discovered is that that expression alone is sufficient to create
marked changes in the autonomic nervous system. When this first occurred, we
were stunned. We weren't expecting this at all. And it happened to both of us.
We felt terrible . What we were generating was sadness, anguish. And when I
lower my brows, which is four, and raise the upper eyelid, which is five, and
narrow the eyelids, which is seven, and press the lips together, which is
twenty-four, I' m generating anger. My heartbeat will go up ten to twelve
beats. My hands will get hot. As I do it, I can't disconnect from the system.
It's very unpleasant, very unpleasant."
Ekman, Friesen, and another colleague, Robert Levenson, who teaches at
Berkeley, published a study of this effect in Science. They monitored the
bodily indices of anger, sadness, and fear—heart rate and body temperature—in
two groups. The first group was instructed to remember and relive a
particularly stressful experience. The other was told to simply produce a
series of facial movements, as instructed by Ekman— to "assume the position,"
as they say in acting class. The second group, the people who were pretending,
showed the same physiological responses as the first. A few years later, a
German team of psychologists published a similar study. They had a group of
subjects look at cartoons, either while holding a pen between their lips—an
action that made it impossible to contract either of the two major smiling
muscles, the risorius and the zygomatic major— or while holding a pen clenched
between their teeth, which had the opposite effect and forced them to smile.
The people with the pen between their teeth found the cartoons much funnier.
Emotion doesn't just go from the inside out. It goes from the outside in.
What's more, neither the subjects "assuming the position" nor the people with
pens in their teeth knew they were making expressions of emotion. In the
facial-feedback system, an expression you do not even know that you have can
create an emotion you did not choose to feel.
It is hard to talk to anyone who knows FACS without this point coming up again
and again. Face-reading depends not just on seeing facial expressions but also
on taking them seriously. One reason most of us—like the TV cop— do not closely
attend to the face is that we view its evidence as secondary, as an adjunct to
what we believe to be real emotion. But there's nothing secondary about the
face, and surely this realization is what set John Yarbrough apart on the night
that the boy in the sports car came at him with a gun. It's not just that he
saw a microexpression that the rest of us would have missed. It's that he took
what he saw so seriously that he was able to overcome every self-protective
instinct in his body, and hold his fire.
6.
Yarbrough has a friend in the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, Sergeant Bob
Harms, who works in narcotics in Palmdale. Harms is a member of the Diogenes
Project as well, but the two men come across very differently. Harms is bigger
than Yarbrough, taller and broader in the chest, with soft brown eyes and dark,
thick hair. Yarbrough is restoring a Corvette and wears Rush Limbaugh ties, and
he says that if he hadn't been a cop he would have liked to stay in the
Marines. Harms came out of college wanting to be a commercial artist; now he
plans to open a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont with his wife when he retires. On
the day we met, Harms was wearing a pair of jean shorts and a short-sleeved
patterned shirt. His badge was hidden inside his shirt. He takes notes not on a
yellow legal pad, which he considers unnecessarily intimidating to witnesses,
but on a powder-blue one. "I always get teased because I'm the touchy-feely
one," Harms said. "John Yarbrough is very analytical. He thinks before he
speaks. There is a lot going on inside his head. He's constantly thinking four
or five steps ahead, then formulating whatever his answers are going to be.
That's not how I do my interviews. I have a conversation. It's not "Where were
you on Friday night?' Because that's the way we normally communicate. I never
say, "I'm Sergeant Harms.' I always start by saying, "I'm Bob Harms, and I'm
here to talk to you about your case,' and the first thing I do is smile."
The sensation of talking to the two men, however, is surprisingly similar.
Normal conversation is like a game of tennis: you talk and I listen, you listen
and I talk, and we feel scrutinized by our conversational partner only when the
ball is in our court. But Yarbrough and Harms never stop watching, even when
they're doing the talking. Yarbrough would comment on my conversational style,
noting where I held my hands as I talked, or how long I would wait out a lull
in the conversation. At one point, he stood up and soundlessly moved to the
door— which he could have seen only in his peripheral vision—opening it just
before a visitor rang the doorbell. Harms gave the impression that he was
deeply interested in me. It wasn't empathy. It was a kind of powerful
curiosity. "I remember once, when I was in prison custody, I used to shake
prisoners' hands," Harms said. "The deputies thought I was crazy. But I wanted
to see what happened, because that's what these men are starving for, some
dignity and respect."
Some of what sets Yarbrough and Harms and the other face readers apart is no
doubt innate. But the fact that people can be taught so easily to recognize
microexpressions, and can learn FACS, suggests that we all have at least the
potential capacity for this kind of perception. Among those who do very well at
face-reading, tellingly, are some aphasics, such as stroke victims who have
lost the ability to understand language. Collaborating with Ekman on a paper
that was recently published in Nature, the psychologist Nancy Etcoff, of
Massachusetts General Hospital, described how a group of aphasics trounced a
group of undergraduates at M.I.T. on the nurses tape. Robbed of the power to
understand speech, the stroke victims had apparently been forced to become far
more sensitive to the information written on people's faces. "They are
compensating for the loss in one channel through these other channels," Etcoff
says. "We could hypothesize that there is some kind of rewiring in the brain,
but I don't think we need that explanation. They simply exercise these skills
much more than we do." Ekman has also done work showing that some abused
children are particularly good at reading faces as well: like the aphasics in
the study, they developed "interpretive strategies"—in their case, so they
could predict the behavior of their volatile parents.
What appears to be a kind of magical, effortless intuition about faces, then,
may not really be effortless and magical at all. This kind of intuition is a
product of desire and effort. Silvan Tomkins took a sabbatical from Princeton
when his son Mark was born, and stayed in his house on the Jersey Shore,
staring into his son's face, long and hard, picking up the patterns of
emotion—the cycles of interest, joy, sadness, and anger—that flash across an
infant's face in the first few months of life. He taught himself the logic of
the furrows and the wrinkles and the creases, the subtle differences between
the pre-smile and the pre-cry face. Later, he put together a library of
thousands of photographs of human faces, in every conceivable expression. He
developed something called the Picture Arrangement Test, which was his version
of the Rorschach blot: a patient would look at a series of pictures and be
asked to arrange them in a sequence and then tell a story based on what he saw.
The psychologist was supposed to interpret the meaning of the story, but
Tomkins would watch a videotape of the patient with the sound off, and by
studying the expressions on the patient's face teach himself to predict what
the story was. Face-reading, for those who have mastered it, becomes a kind of
compulsion; it becomes hard to be satisfied with the level and quality of
information that most of us glean from normal social encounters. "Whenever we
get together," Harms says of spending time with other face readers, "we debrief
each other. We're constantly talking about cases, or some of these videotapes
of Ekman's, and we say, "I missed that, did you get that?' Maybe there's an
emotion attached there. We're always trying to place things, and replaying
interviews in our head."
This is surely why the majority of us don't do well at reading faces: we feel
no need to make that extra effort. People fail at the nurses tape, Ekman says,
because they end up just listening to the words. That's why, when Tomkins was
starting out in his quest to understand the face, he always watched television
with the sound turned off. "We are such creatures of language that what we hear
takes precedence over what is supposed to be our primary channel of
communication, the visual channel," he once said. "Even though the visual
channel provides such enormous information, the fact is that the voice preëmpts
the individual's attention, so that he cannot really see the face while he
listens." We prefer that way of dealing with the world because it does not
challenge the ordinary boundaries of human relationships. Ekman, in one of his
essays, writes of what he learned from the legendary sociologist Erving
Goffman. Goffman said that part of what it means to be civilized is not to
"steal" information that is not freely given to us. When someone picks his nose
or cleans his ears, out of unthinking habit, we look away. Ekman writes that
for Goffman the spoken word is "the acknowledged information, the information
for which the person who states it is willing to take responsibility," and he
goes on:
When the secretary who is miserable about a fight with her husband the previous
night answers, "Just fine," when her boss asks, "How are you this
morning?"—that false message may be the one relevant to the boss's interactions
with her. It tells him that she is going to do her job. The true message—that
she is miserable—he may not care to know about at all as long as she does not
intend to let it impair her job performance.
What would the boss gain by reading the subtle and contradictory
microexpressions on his secretary's face? It would be an invasion of her
privacy and an act of disrespect. More than that, it would entail an
obligation. He would be obliged to do something, or say something, or feel
something that might otherwise be avoided entirely. To see what is intended to
be hidden, or, at least, what is usually missed, opens up a world of
uncomfortable possibilities. This is the hard part of being a face reader.
People like that have more faith in their hunches than the rest of us do. But
faith is not certainty. Sometimes, on a routine traffic stop late at night, you
end up finding out that your hunch was right. But at other times you'll never
know. And you can't even explain it properly, because what can you say? You did
something the rest of us would never have done, based on something the rest of
us would never have seen.
"I was working in West Hollywood once, in the nineteen-eighties," Harms said.
"I was with a partner, Scott. I was driving. I had just recently come off the
prostitution team, and we spotted a man in drag. He was on Sunset, and I didn't
recognize him. At that time, Sunset was normally for females. So it was kind of
odd. It was a cold night in January. There was an all-night restaurant on
Sunset called Ben Franks, so I asked my partner to roll down the window and ask
the guy if he was going to Ben Franks— just to get a reaction. And the guy
immediately keys on Scott, and he's got an overcoat on, and he's all bundled
up, and he starts walking over to the car. It had been raining so much that the
sewers in West Hollywood had backed up, and one of the manhole covers had been
cordoned off because it was pumping out water. The guy comes over to the squad
car, and he's walking right through that. He's fixated on Scott. So we asked
him what he was doing. He says, "I was out for a walk.' And then he says, "I
have something to show you.'"
Later, after the incident was over, Harms and his partner learned that the man
had been going around Hollywood making serious threats, that he was unstable
and had just attempted suicide, that he was in all likelihood about to erupt. A
departmental inquiry into the incident would affirm that Harms and his partner
had been in danger: the man was armed with a makeshift flamethrower, and what
he had in mind, evidently, was to turn the inside of the squad car into an
inferno. But at the time all Harms had was a hunch, a sense from the situation
and the man's behavior and what he glimpsed inside the man's coat and on the
man's face— something that was the opposite of whatever John Yarbrough saw in
the face of the boy in Willowbrook. Harms pulled out his gun and shot the man
through the open window. "Scott looked at me and was, like, "What did you do?'
because he didn't perceive any danger," Harms said. "But I did."
Copyright 2002, Malcolm Gladwell
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