Facial Muscle
Example Image
1
Inner Brow Raiser
Frontalis, pars medialis
2
Outer Brow Raiser
Frontalis, pars lateralis
4
Brow Lowerer
Corrugator supercilii, Depressor supercilii
5
Upper Lid Raiser
Levator palpebrae superioris
6
Cheek Raiser
Orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis
7
Lid Tightener
Orbicularis oculi, pars palpebralis
9
Nose Wrinkler
Levator labii superioris alaquae nasi
10
Upper Lip Raiser
Levator labii superioris
11
Nasolabial Deepener
Zygomaticus minor
12
Lip Corner Puller
Zygomaticus major
In the thirty years since this method of measuring facial expression has been developed and distributed to scientists, hundreds of studies have discovered that the muscle configurations that Darwin described for many emotions correspond to the facial expressions people display when feeling the emotion. Ekman’s work on facial expression catalyzed a new field—affective science—and led to a more precise understanding of the place of emotion in the brain, the role of emotion in social life, parallels between human and nonhuman emotion, and how we all have different emotional styles. For thirty years, scientists have relied on these methods, and those six emotions, to parse human emotional life. Amid the hundreds of studies, the handbooks, the reviews, the new methodologies and old controversies, one finds empirical support for three deep insights into emotion, the focus of the next chapter. Emotions are signs of our deepest commitments. They are wired into our nervous system. Emotions are intuitive guides to our most important ethical judgments. Our pursuit of the meaningful life requires an engagement with emotion. Our jen ratios are revealed in subtle movements of the face.
3 Rational Irrationality
I STILL REMEMBER THE DAY as clear as a bell. Off to the side of the seventh-grade four square game, the love of my life, Lynn Freitas, approached me with hands coyly behind her back. She came unusually close—we were face to face, separated by nine to ten inches—and with a delighted smile framed by her rolling, curly hair asked, “Hey, Dacher, wanna screw?” A surge of thoughts raced through my mind—at last she had recognized my subtle prepubescent allure, at last my longings would make contact with inexplicable happenings on my middle school playground. As I was in the midst of mumbling an earnest and affirmative reply, she held her hand in front of me, palm up, with a screw lying flat on her tender fingers. All I remember was a roar of laughter from the cabal of finger-pointing girls who had suddenly surrounded me to witness this character assassination.
Had I been a FACS-certified seventh grader and known then what I have learned in studying the nonverbal clues of sexual desire (of which Lynn showed not a scintilla), I probably would have been fooled again; it may be in our best interests to be fooled by those we love. Had I trained my ear to discern the fine acoustics involved in playful teasing, I probably would have detected subtle deviations from truthfulness in the artfully elongated vowels of Lynn’s enunciation (“Hey, Daaacher, wanna screeew”) that would have given away her playful intent. Had I read Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict from 1963, I would have understood why I was fooled, or at least known what to look for when Lynn Freitas made her offer.
Schelling observed that most meaningful exchanges—from the promise of undying love or mutual gain in risky business ventures to the strategic threats of diplomats and negotiators—hinge on solving the commitment problem. The commitment problem has two faces. The first is that we must often put aside self-interested courses of action—offers of affairs, chances to gain at colleagues’ expense, opportunities to lie to company stockholders—in the service of our long-term commitments to one another. Long-term relations require that we transcend narrow, in-the-moment, pleasure-seeking self-interest.
The second face of the commitment problem may be more challenging: We must reliably identify who is committed to us, we must find those morally inclined individuals to enter into long-term bonds with, we must know who is (and who is not) likely to be faithful and caring, and disinclined to cheat, lie, and sacrifice us in the service of the pursuit of their self-interest. We must quickly make these decisions to avoid being fooled or exploited by the Lynn Freitases of the world on a regular basis. What helps us solve the commitment problem?
Emotion. The very nature of emotional experience—its seeming absoluteness, heat, and urgency—can readily overwhelm narrow calculations of self-interest, allowing us to honor the commitments integral to long-term bonds: monogamy, fairness, duties and obligations. The potent pangs of guilt help us repair our dearest relations, even at great cost to the self. The single-minded feeling of compassion or awe can motivate us to act on behalf of other individuals or collectives, regardless of costs or benefits to the self.
Just as important is the centrality of others’ emotional displays in our attempts to discern others’ commitments to us. As important as language is, it is striking how impotent it is in conveying the commitments that define the course of life—the sense that someone will really love us through thick and thin, the sense that a colleague will be a lifelong collaborator, the sense that a politician is devoted to the greater good. Words are easy to manipulate. Not so, emotional displays. Emotional displays provide reliable clues to others’ commitments because they are involuntary, costly, and hard to fake (as opposed to words, which Lynn Freitas used to dupe me). Emotional displays have much in common with the peacock’s tail or stotting of the red deer: all are metabolically expensive behaviors that are beyond volitional control, and thus less subject to strategic manipulation or deception.