All smiles require that we flex muscles around the mouth, but to tell the difference between a real smile and a staged one, look to the eyes. The way we use the muscles at the outer corners of our eyes, called the orbiculares oculi, distinguishes a genuine from a stilted expression. In a real smile, we contract those muscles, pulling in the skin next to our eyes, and giving ourselves crow’s feet that later on we might pay handsomely to erase. When smiling on command rather than when actually inspired, we use the risorii muscles in each cheek to pull our lips into the right shape, but the crow’s feet don’t emerge.
How you can you tell the difference between pleasant surprise and unwelcome fear? These expressions share raised eyebrows and wide eyes, and might look similar if we orient toward the baby blues alone. The difference in emotion can be read in the lips. Stretched lips, pulled back at the corners, are the only muscle movement that can reliably distinguish fear from surprise. A surprised mouth pulls down more than a fearful one.
Anger and sorrow actually have some similarities, and if we try to discern these expressions with a quick glance at another person’s eyes, we might confuse them. Eyebrows lower and eyes close off when someone is either mad or sad. In the same vein, angry and grossed-out mouths can look quite similar. The tight lips that we might associate with pent-up rage could also be disgust. To read anger right, we should frame up the mouth and nose. The lip-depressor muscles that pull our lower lip down remain taut and flatlined when we feel anger, but the corners of our lips turn toward the ground when we honestly feel sad. And when anger and disgust are strong, we can tell the difference between a cross expression and a repulsed one by looking at the nose. It scrunches up a bit when we’re angry but bunches even more when we’re grossed out.
It’s a challenge, of course, to know what parts of the face to frame up when we’re trying to read what another person is feeling. The expressions might live for just a brief moment. Or maybe we didn’t get as good a look as we’d like. When we are gauging what someone else is feeling, we might get them wrong, or at minimum see something others may not.
Part of the reason for our visual idiosyncracies is that faces can be particularly expressive. As humans, we often feel multiple emotions simultaneously, and they can show up on our faces all at once. This makes it tricky to read or intuit what other people are feeling when we get mixed messages from what we see on their face.
Take the photograph on this page, for example. It’s of me. Not a particularly flattering depiction, I know, and, yes, those are in fact my natural wrinkles. It took a fair bit of humility and a lot of bravery to post it to a few social media sites. But I did, asking others to describe the emotional expression they saw on my face upon first glance. You can play along too. What do you see?
About a hundred people responded with a single word each. Even though everyone was looking at the same photograph, the group saw thirty different emotions in that single snapshot. The word cloud below presents the most-often stated responses in larger size and the rare responses as smaller. A quick look will show you that, for the most part, the group saw some sort of negative feeling—“discomfort,” “apprehension,” and “awkwardness” being the three most commonly mentioned. But 15 percent of people saw something entirely different; they saw a positive expression—happiness, joy, and playfulness, for instance.
The unique visual interpretations we reach can have a big impact on some of the most important relationships we have. To prove the point, social psychologist William Brady and I created a more rigorous test of how people read faces. We gathered three dozen photographs of men and women smiling and frowning. Importantly, there were mixed messages in each photograph. Every single person displayed hints of both positive and negative expressions. In one photograph, for example, a man’s eyes crinkled at the outer edges, which was a cue he felt happy. In that same photo, though, the man’s lips curled up at the edges, suggesting disdain or disgust. We asked over three hundred adults in committed relationships to decide whether each person looked like they were feeling a positive or negative emotion. When we analyzed their decisions, we could tell which parts of the faces they had visually framed up. If they indicated that the majority of photographed people appeared to express positive emotions, we knew they had framed up those areas of the face that displayed happiness or amusement. If they reported that most expressed negative emotions, we knew they’d framed up those that evinced anger or sadness.
We thought that these predispositions for misperception might change the way people experienced conflict in their personal relationships when problems cropped up. We asked our participants to think about relationship issues that were troubling or irksome. They talked about imbalance in household chore distribution, financial strain, or differences in opinion about how to discipline the kids. Sure, these concerns made them feel frustrated, worked up, and angry, but some people experienced the disagreements as wounding battles while others chalked them up to minor blips. Perhaps surprisingly, those who more accurately identified expressions for what they were, reading both the positive and negative emotions equally well even when that meant recognizing the frustration or discontent on their partner’s face, felt okay after conflict. Reading negative emotions right does not ensure despair, but instead might prompt a truer understanding of what dynamics of the situation can be repaired.
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Sometimes the situation we are in does not require us to perceive a single person’s reactions. Sometimes the situation we face requires that we read a crowd.
Even if you’re not a New Yorker trying to cross the street at rush hour in Times Square, you might hate crowds. Regardless of where we live, there’s one place in particular we all could find ourselves in that produces a particular source of dread—in front of a large room filled to capacity, delivering a speech. A national survey of more than eight thousand people found that public speaking was the most commonly held fear. In fact, many people said they feared it more than death. One reason that we loathe public speaking is that the public’s reaction feels important but so uncertain. We care about other people’s opinions of us, so whether they’re giving us a thumbs-up or thumbs-down really matters. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett long suffered from these anxieties, even going so far as to drop out of college classes when they required speaking aloud in class. He now takes questions for five hours from the more than forty thousand attendees at each year’s shareholders’ meeting.
The fear of public speaking doesn’t apply just to special occasions. It’s not just about delivering a killer quarterly report at the team meeting. Or standing up at a wedding and giving a knockout toast. It’s also everyday public speaking that gets our heart racing. It’s just as scary to talk to a small group as to a large crowd when you haven’t prepared your thoughts.