Ran across this link earlier today and it’s a pretty interesting read about facial expressions. It goes on to say that emotional facial expressions are innate and not learned visually. It goes over a study where it compares sighted athletes to blind ones and how they produce similar expressions.
There’s also a useful bit in there about the difference between social smiles and true smiles. Social smiles use just the mouth area, whereas true ones cause the cheeks to rise and eyes to narrow.
Link: Facial expressions of emotion are innate, not learned, says new study
I saw a documentary on faces a while back and it had a segment about people without this innate ability. They had something like autism and they were either completely unable to read faces or in some cases studied faces and trained themselves to understand. But even then, the one’s who trained themselves didn’t really understand, they still had to translate what they were seeing and compare them to the images they had studied. I thought it was very interesting that the same people who couldn’t read faces also couldn’t emote facially. They generally mirrored the facial expressions of those around them without really knowing what it meant.
That sounds really interesting, I’ll have to see if I can check out that documentary. I wonder what happens when you feel a strong emotion like happiness or sadness if you can’t emote facially. Like, how would you express yourself? Must be really frustrating to not be able to communicate what you are feeling to others.
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