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A microexpression is a brief, involuntary expression of a real emotion. They usually occur when an individual experiences a strong emotion but tries to conceal his/her feelings.
Unlike normal facial expressions, it is difficult to voluntary produce or neutralize microexpressions.
People can express any of the seven universal emotions expressed in the face and can occur as fast as 1/15th to 1/30th of a second.
Learning to identify microexpressions can be a game changer because facial expressions of emotion and microexpressions are windows to a person’s mental states and processes beyond their words.
Why should you learn to read them? Read on to learn more.
Benefits of Reading Facial Expressions of Emotion and Microexpressions
- Facial expressions of emotion are probably the most important signal of the face because they tell us about people’s personalities, emotions, motivations, or intent.
- They are not only signs of people’s internal states; they are also signals to others to act in certain ways, providing messages for social coordination.
- They are also important signals of socialization and enculturation.
Facial expressions are also special because they can signal different, discrete emotions (otherwise known as the seven universal emotions) – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
When we read someone’s facial expressions of emotion, we know
- How their mind is processing something (antecedents and appraisals)
- What their thoughts are turned toward (cognitive gating)
- What their bodies are primed to do in terms of action (functions of emotion; physiological signatures)
For example, if we read anger, we know that a person’s mind if thinking that their goals have been obstructed, that blood is rushing disproportionately to their arms to prepare them to fight, and that their cognitions are gating to be aware of threat signals in others.
If we read disgust, we know that a person’s mind is thinking that something is contaminated and their cognitions are gating towards eliminating contaminated objects.
If we read fear, we know that their minds perceived a threat, that blood is rushing to their legs, and that they are primed to flee or freeze.
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The History Behind Micro Expressions – Who Discovered Microexpressions?
Microexpressions were first discovered by Haggard and Isaacs (1966). In their study, Haggard and Isaacs outlined how they discovered these “micromomentary” expressions while scanning motion picture films of psychotherapy hours, searching for indications of non-verbal communication between patient and therapist.
At around the same time, Condon and Ogston (1967) pioneered the study of interactions at the fraction-of-a-second level. In Condon’s famous research project, he scrutinized a four-and-a-half hour film segment frame by frame, where each frame represented 1/25th of a second.
After studying this film segment for a year and a half, he discerned interactional micromovements, such as the wife moving her shoulder exactly as the husband’s hands came up, which combined yielded microrhythms. Condon’s work, however, did not focus on facial expressions.
Microexpression Research and in Microexpressions in Popular Culture
Subsequently, Ekman and Friesen (1969, 1974) included the concept of microexpression recognition in their studies of deception.
The results of this work were reported in the book Telling Lies (Ekman, 1985), and were popularized in the mass media through the television series Lie To Me.
Although the existence of microexpressons was reported in the 1960’s, the first report published in a peer-reviewed, scientific article about individual microexpression recognition skills was Matsumoto et al.’s (2000).
References
Condon, W., S,, & Ogston, W. D. (1967). A segmentation of behavior. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 5, 221-235.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica, 1, 49-98.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1974). Nonverbal behavior and psychopathology. In R. J. Friedman & M. Katz (Eds.), The psychology of depression: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 3-31). Washington, D. C.: Winston and Sons.
Haggard, E. A., & Isaacs, K. S. (1966). Micro-momentary facial expressions as indicators of ego mechanisms in psychotherapy. In L. A. Gottschalk & A. H. Auerbach (Eds.), Methods of Research in Psychotherapy (pp. 154-165). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Matsumoto, D., LeRoux, J. A., Wilson-Cohn, C., Raroque, J., Kooken, K., Ekman, P., . . . Goh, A. (2000). A new test to measure emotion recognition ability: Matsumoto and Ekman’s Japanese and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition Test (JACBART). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 24(3), 179-209.
Porter, S., & ten Brinke, L. (2008). Reading between the lies: Identifying concealed and falsified emotions in universal facial expressions. Psychological Science, 19(5), 508-514.