It’s Not in Your Words, It’s All Over Your Face

All social psychologists must deal with a conundrum implicit in all human behavior: the problem of self-reporting. Self-reporting is exactly what it sounds like: it’s what people say about themselves – their emotions, motivations, and feelings.
If you ask someone to rate their emotional stability, or if you elicit an opinion about a new product, you’re relying on that person’s ability to properly asses how he’s feeling, why he’s feeling that way, and what his behavior is as a result of that feeling. Researchers take this for granted all the time. The plain truth is unfortunate; we aren’t good observers of our own emotions and we are worse at explaining our own behavior. So is it impossible to objectively gauge people’s emotional reactions to stimuli in the world?

Facial Action Coding System: An Emotional State Map

Paul Ekman is one scientist who has been saying ‘NO’ to this question for almost 40 years. In the early 1970s, Ekman developed a method called FACS – or facial action coding system – which was designed to map the human face into zones, isolating regions of the face which were thought to convey or store genuine aspects of a person’s current emotional state. It was this insight which gave birth to a new field of psychological study: microexpressions.
Microexpressions are exactly what they sound like; fleeting, nearly imperceptible facial gestures which symbolically represent emotional experiences, honestly and accurately, because we don’t even realize we’re doing them. How’s that for an objective measurement?
Microexpressions can occur in only 1/25^th of a second (they can also be slower). It’s a flash of an animated expression that we barely even see, a nervous tick in the eye that’s hardly perceptible, a neck strain that you might mistake for the simple clearing of one’s throat, or even an irregular pattern of blinking. These muscular movements can give an observer clues into a person’s emotional constitution. In short, it doesn’t matter if you’re a gangster or a soccer mom – you smile when you’re happy. And when you’re trying to conceal your happiness, you still smile, just really really quickly.
Physiological response measures, such as galvanic skin response, heart rate, and/or pulse, are often used as objective measures of emotional arousal because there’s just no way you can lie about the temperate of your skin or mislead researchers into thinking your heart is pumping slower than it actually is (perhaps unless you’re a Yoga master ).
Even these methods, however, suffer from their own shortcomings. Emotional arousal is not semantic. In other words someone emotionally excited to anger or violence may look as aroused as someone who was sexually excited, though the motivations for these emotional states are radically different. Ekman’s emotional coding scale measures the incidence of microexpressions as a means of detecting subconscious emotional states. Unlike other implicit measures, however, Ekman’s method can distinguish between contempt, disgust, and anger.

Analyzing Microexpressions with Implicit Measures

In this way, Ekman’s methodological approach to analyzing microexpressions becomes a viable method for objectively gauging and categorizing an emotional reaction without the biases and limitations of self-reporting.In fact Ekman’s research, has given birth to all sorts of interesting emotional taxonomies ostensibly vying to consistently and comprehensively answer the same questions: What are the fundamental emotions, the so-called building blocks of higher order feelings (like nostalgia or envy)? Are they universal or culturally relevant? And are they scientifically detectable in microexpressions across different sexes, races, and ethnicities?

Start looking for tension in the jaw line (for contempt), pursed lips (for anger), and raised eyebrows (for surprise); then you tell me. You may find that we’re a lot more predictable than we let on, especially when we’re being measured through a subconscious process. Emotional expression is not just something you do in a therapy session; it’s something you wear on your face for the entire world to see. Indeed, Emerson was onto something when he wrote: “Beauty without expression is boring.”
Of course, the entire field of market research is predicated upon techniques that derive what people are feeling and their motivations for feeling that way. Therefore, the more researchers can refine their methods of observation, the more sophisticated and compelling a product they can deliver.
Nearly all of the nascent advancements in market research (neuromarketing, subconscious priming and activation, cultural ethnographies, etc…) were born out of sound research methodology and science. Facial coding, a theory fusing our theory about emotions from social psychology with the rigor and precision of the scientific method, is yet another under-utilized tool in the researcher’s toolbox. Are you ahead of the curve, or behind it?