Former FBI Agent Explains How to Read Facial Expressions | WIRED

From the moment we are born, we spend an inordinate amount of time studying the faces of others as babies, we can recognize that big smile we see on that loving mother looking down on us, etc., but we are faced with many variants of that. just take a look at these all the examples of smiles some come to us they are very genuine some are a little reserved some are a little nervous they are all smiles but what are they communicating? My name is Joe Navarro and for 25 years I was a spy hunter for the FBI, you may be familiar with my previous video.

I talked about body language, there's just no Pinocchio effect, and people who blab about it and say, well, we can detect deception because the person touches their nose or covers their mouth, that's pure nonsense. and today we are going to focus on the face when it comes to non-verbal

expressions

, the face is key, there is so much information and feelings that we receive from the face that for us the face has primacy, so one of the ways of looking at the face is to think about two areas comfort and discomfort because really that's how the brain reacts to the world so let's start with psychological comfort when we are very comfortable the muscles of the face relax a lot and we have all the behaviors that are associated with this smile laugh generally the pupils are a little wider the lips are full and generally the chin tends to be more outward at the same time when there is psychological discomfort it generally begins to register in several areas now some people will see it in the front and here between the eyes , where your brow will furrow or your eyes will squint and of course your chin will sink downward or in some cases when something is really emotional you will see the chin start to vibrate, covering the eyes as well. a display of psychological discomfort so that our faces what we feel at that moment is immediately shown through our non-verbal means and the easiest way to see it is that behavior consistent with comfort or is it consistent with discomfort, one of the questions which they often do to me.

The question is how we

read

each other how we

read

each other's faces we start with the hair how they comb their hair what color it is it is dry it is wet it is curly it is that arranged like children we play with each other's hair we look at each other's hair we notice immediately when it is wet or dry or has changed in some way we look at the forehead for information when it is soft the forehead tells us that everything is fine and placid when it is wrinkled we begin to notice that maybe there is some kind of discomfort the eyebrows you know the raising of the eyebrows is our exclamation point doing that eyebrow flash when we see someone we recognize and say hey how are you the glabella this little area between the eyes someone says something we don't like and we could squint and look at them while we scan nose.

Do we wrinkle our nose up? We make that bunny nose around three months of age. Babies already do this when they don't like something they are offered and then there is the lips that transmit as much information perhaps as often as the eyes ask me about smiles we have the social smile the interested smile a curious smile we have little secret smiles that we could giving someone we are interested in there is a lot in our mouths is very expressive, but from a very early age we are already focusing on these things, you may not notice, for example, the pupils, whether they are wide or narrow, but unconsciously your brain is evaluating this information, there is so much there. so we never stop communicating with our faces, it is something that is always telegraphing our emotions and feelings and sometimes even our desires.

One of the things that surprised me when studying faces was what I had been picking up on for decades when I look back. In the Lone Ranger watching the fox movies or even Batman and Robin movies, one of the things you notice is that all these good guys wore masks that covered their eyes, but the bad guys always covered their mouths so the bank robbers would wear a handkerchief and then just wipe it over their faces, we are certainly being affected by the fact that we can't see the whole face. I mean, we first had reports of this right after World War I, where we saw the horrors of that war and the soldiers whose faces were somehow improved. they had to wear these masks and even with mass they were still not well received in society, so there has always been something disturbing about not being able to see the full face and I think it has to do with the fact that we get so There is a lot of information from there, but even with the mass we can still communicate with each other, we can still understand what people are trying to say and you can read above the mask line.

Watch this clip. Notice that even though they are wearing a mask. we can still see the emotions behind that mask, we can still decode that face now, obviously, we won't see the lip compression, but with some people you really see it in both the forehead and the glabella region of the eyes and then , of course. There is a lot of squinting in the eye sockets, so for some people it doesn't matter that they can't see their mouth, they will certainly see it on their face, but they know that the rest of the body is transmitting information if they can't see the face. complete where we can go the neck the shoulders right the hands the fingers the thumbs in particular right so when we emphasize the fingers are wide when we lack emphasis our fingers come together even our feet communicate feelings so we have to redirect where we get information, but always Remember that from the moment we are born we look at the face for that information, we just have to be patient with ourselves and know that there is still information out there that we may need to obtain. from other parts of the body, many of us are now doing these video conferences, zoom, google meets, etc., and the visual range has completely changed because now we only see, maybe from the chest up, maybe we are only seeing . the face one of the things we know is that in face to face meetings this tends to be very aggressive on a subconscious level, so looking directly at another person like I'm now looking directly into the lens actually creates an awkwardness that really we feel.

Greater comfort when we turn slightly makes the other person relax and one of the mistakes I find on zoom calls and in Google Meet and other environments is this very direct and intense gaze into the lens, so one of the things that you can try below. When you are on a video call, lean in and see if it is more comfortable for you, see if you are more relaxed, see if when you do that behavior the other person does the same, feel a little more relaxed, maybe one of the people leans back a little more. Things I teach is that synchrony is harmony, so the more I can get the other party to relax to mirror my behaviors, the more I know we are in sync and that is powerful because we are both engaging with each other. others on a conscious and subconscious level, so about 30 years ago, while still working for the FBI and conducting thousands of interviews, I began to notice that there were times when I would look at a face and there would be something strange about it that I couldn't understand.

I couldn't pinpoint what I was seeing, so I started thinking about the concept of chirality and chirality, which is generally used in chemistry, means that when you bend something it looks like it's going to bend perfectly, but it actually doesn't and that en What I found with faces is sometimes when someone presents themselves in a way that is difficult to interpret is because their faces are actually showing two emotions, one on the left and one on the right, and if you divide the face in half and You only cover half. From the face you will be able to see more clearly what that specific emotion is.

Look at these photographs. These photographs were taken during emotionally charged moments and when you see the face for the first time, you can look at it and say, "Well, something is happening." but it's not until you perfectly cover one half and then cover the other half that you start to see the real big differences. Normally, when we feel an emotion, we see it completely on both sides of the face, but since we don't see the full emotion on the entire face that is something we need to focus on and determine why because something is not right why we focus so much. on the face we focus on the face out of necessity because through our faces we can show that we care through our faces we can validate what others are going through and so by studying the faces of others we gain understanding about ourselves and We realize that our body language will positively affect others and that is why we study the non-verbal, we study the non-verbal because it benefits us. but it also benefits others