-they’ve lots to tell
WHEN LISTENING to someone speak, or while looking at others, most people focus on the lower part of the face. Often, we do not even realise this. However, if the person’s true feelings are ‘leaked’ to the observer, they are more likely to appear on the upper face and could easily be missed. Studies have also shown that the lower portion of the face (nose, lips and cheeks) is more active than the upper face (eyes, brows, and forehead) when individuals engage in deceitful intentions. It is said that officials at the American Embassy here are trained to interpret such phenomenon when interviewing applicants for non-immigrant visas.
Perhaps the adage, ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’ may be correct, because human beings learn in early childhood to manipulate facial emotions to make them appropriate to a given social situation which, in time, allows them to engage in deceitful behaviour.
For example, a person who is angry with their superior may display a social smile, rather than an angry scowl, when asking for a raise. In dentistry, the teeth play a pivotal role, because they can serve as a distractive element in the sub-conscious analysis of one’s facial expression.
To better understand the brain’s recognition and processing facial manifestations of emotion, the researchers briefly showed 30 people line drawings of a human face displaying different emotions on the upper versus the lower face, including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and neutral.
Participants viewed the drawings in either right or left visual field, and most of them often identified the lower face emotion, regardless of the visual field. When subjects were instructed to focus on the upper face, they did so best when pictures were shown to their left visual field (processed by the right side of the brain).
However, most people continued to identify the lower facial emotion when viewing in their right visual field (processed by the brain’s left side).
Recognition of emotional displays on the lower face appear to be processed by the brain’s left hemisphere as part of the social, or learned, emotional system, whereas emotional displays on the upper face appear to be processed in the brain’s right hemisphere as part of the primary, or inborn, emotional system.
These findings help us to gain a better understanding of the nuerologic basis for affective communication, which will increase a physician’s ability to assess how diseases, such as stroke and dementia, alter these functions.
People may naturally focus on the lower face to aid in speech comprehension during a conversation, especially in noisy environments. Social conventions may also play a role, as many cultures consider it unacceptable to look someone directly in the eyes — the ‘evil-eye’ belief. This may be interpreted as aggressive or threatening behaviour, similar to those observed in some animal species.
There is a natural curve, starting in early childhood, for acquiring the skills to read facial displays of emotion. We certainly can train ourselves to pay more attention to upper facial displays, which helps us read a person’s true emotional state.
For example, judges can learn to tell if a person may be guilty of a crime by reading the facial expression of that person when he or she is first confronted by the accuser in court. However, this ability can have a downside, because of social conventions.