Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [82]
Ekman calls that kind of fleeting look a micro expression, which is a very particular and critical kind of facial expression. 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 that makes expressions that we have no conscious control over. Few of us, for instance, 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 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. Similarly, there is an expression that Ekman has dubbed the Duchenne smile, in honor of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who first attempted to document with a camera the workings of the muscles of the face. If I were to ask you to smile, you would flex your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you were to smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you would 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 orbitalis 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.”
Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. That response may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second or be detectable only if electrical sensors are attached to the face. But it’s always there. Silvan Tomkins once began a lecture by bellowing, “The face is like the penis!” What he meant was 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 — such as the sense that I’m really unhappy even if I deny it — leaks out. That’s what happened to Mary. 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 asks you, ‘What are you getting upset about?’ or ‘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 from the O.J. Simpson trial into the VCR. It showed Kato Kaelin, Simpson’s shaggy-haired houseguest, being questioned by Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the case. Kaelin sits in the witness box, with a vacant look on his face. Clark asks a hostile question. Kaelin leans forward and answers her softly.