Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [80]
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 document. It is a strangely riveting work, full of such details as 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); and the critical distinctions between infraorbital furrows and the nasolabial furrow. John Gottman, whose research on marriage I wrote about in chapter I, has collaborated with Ekman for years and uses the principles of FACS in analyzing the emotional states of couples. Other researchers have employed Ekman’s system to study everything from schizophrenia to heart disease; it has even been put to use by computer animators at Pixar (Toy Story) and Dream Works (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 those who have mastered it gain an extraordinary level of insight into the messages we send each other when we look into one another’s eyes.
Ekman recalled 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 said. “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 Clinton’s 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.’ ” Ekman’s voice trailed off. It was clear that he rather liked Clinton and that he wanted Clinton’s 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.”
3. The Naked Face
What Ekman is saying is that the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. In fact, he makes an even bolder claim — one central to understanding how mind reading works — and that is that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind.
The beginnings of this insight came when Ekman and Friesen were first sitting across from each other, 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