We like to think we can read people like a book, relying mostly on facial expressions that give away the emotions inside. But when it comes to the strongest emotions, we read much less from facial expressions than we think we do. In fact, even though we believe it's the face that tells the story, we're typically reading something very different: body language.
That's the new finding from a study published this week in the journal Science. Researchers from Princeton, New York University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem presented volunteer study participants with a series of pictures showing people experiencing extreme emotion, either positive or negative. The images included professional tennis players who had just won or lost a point in a major match.
In some of the images, researchers only show the study participants a face; in others, only a body; and in others still, both the body and the face. You might think it'd be obvious from a face whether he has just won Wimbledon. But it turns out it isn't.
"The striking finding was that our participants had no clue if the motion was positive or negative, when they were judging faces only," says lead study author Hillel Aviezer from Hebrew University. "By comparison, when they were judging the body (with no face), or the body with the face, they easily told positive from negative expressions. "
The findings are doubly surprising because the study participants themselves were convinced that they recognized the emotions from the faces, not from body language. "They even had their own theories about what part of the face was most important — but this was a false idea," Aviezer says. He adds that we do, of course, read a great deal of emotional information from faces but only in certain situations.
"I think the findings may have some clinical applications," he says. "Consider populations such as individuals with autism (孤独症). We know these people often have difficulties with recognizing facial expressions," he says. "Until now we have been trying to help them by training them to better understand just the faces. But our work suggests that perhaps we should teach them how to recognize emotions from the full person. "
