Facial Expressions

A Facial expressions are a form of non-verbal communication, which make up a large part of our daily communication. By facial movements, we can suggest volumes of infor-mation without ‘speaking any words’. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans but are also found in most other mammals and a few other animal species. Facial expressions and their significance in the perceiver can, to some extent, vary between cultures with evidence from descriptions in the works of Charles Darwin. Understanding facial impressions is of great importance, and also, some essential elements should be taken into account when people interpret the impressions.

B Facial expressions are closely tied to emotions. Expressions are configurations of different small muscle movements in the face that show an individual’s discrete emotional states and a vast amount of cognitive information. A number of studies have proved that facial expressions are viewed as one of the best measures of emotional response. Sometimes words do not necessarily coincide with emotions, but the face might betray a person’s actual feelings. At the same time, the close link between emotions and expressions can also work in the other direction; it has been observed that voluntarily assuming an expression can actually cause the associated emotion.

C Some expressions like anger and extreme contentment can be accurately comprehended even between members of different species. Others, however, are hard to interpret even in familiar individuals. For instance, disgust and fear can be tough to distinguish. Because faces have only a limited range of movements, expressions rely upon fairly slight differ-ences in the proportions and relative positions of facial features, and reading them requires considerable sensitivity to some. Meanwhile, one’s life experiences, beliefs and concep-tual knowledge will have an influence on how he deciphers the facial expressions.

D Also, a person’s eyes reveal much about how they are feeling or what they are thinking. Research by Boston College professor Joe Tecce suggests that stress levels are reflected by blink rates. He supports his findings with statistics on the relation between the blink rates of presidential candidates and their success in their races. Tecce claims that the faster blinker in the presidential debates has lost every election since 1980, which seems interesting. However, it is important to recognise that non-verbal communication is multi-channelled, and focusing on only one aspect is biased. Nervousness can also be measured by examining each candidate’s perspiration, eye contact and stiffness.

E As Charles Darwin, the first person who pointed out that the facial expressions of par-ticular emotions were universal, noted in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: ‘The young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same muscle movement.’ Still, up to the mid-20th century, most anthropologists believed that facial expressions were entirely learned and could therefore differ among cultures. Studies conducted in the 1960s by Paul Ekman eventually supported Darwin’s belief to a large degree.

F Ekman’s opinion, which was contrary to that of some anthropologists including Margaret Mead, showed that facial expressions of emotions are not culturally determined but universal across human cultures. During the period between 1967 and 1968, Dr. Ekman travelled to Papua New Guinea to investigate the non-verbal communication behaviours of the South Fore people. If the South Fore tribe, a remote and primitive one, could interpret the facial expressions as their western counterparts, we would gain significant evidence of the universality of facial expressions. Subjects, including 189 adults and 130 children from a very isolated population, as well as 23 members who lived in a less-isolated lifestyle, were shown three pictures (two for children) of facial expressions and then asked to match those pictures to three different scenarios that described particular emotions.

G It was discovered that the isolated South Fore people could identify emotions with the same accuracy as the less-isolated control group, but the study displayed some problems including the fact that both fear and surprise are constantly misidentified. He also drew a conclusion that certain facial expressions correspond to particular emotions and cannot be covered, no matter what the cultural background is, and regardless of whether or not the culture has been isolated or exposed to the mainstream.

H Expressions Ekman found to be generally recognised included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise (note that none of these emotions has a definitive social component, such as shame, pride or schadenfreude). Findings on contempt (which is social), an expression which can occur with or without a hint of small muscle motions, are less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universal. This may suggest that the facial expressions are largely related to the mind, with each part of the face expressing a particular emotion.

Questions 14 – 19

Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A–H.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–H, in boxes 14–19 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

• 14.mention of the data correlation between blink frequency and election results
• 15.early records of how culture influences the interpretation of facial expressions
• 16.the difficulty in identifying the actual meaning of facial expressions
• 17.reference to the sociality of several facial expressions
• 18.various indicators of how nervous a person is
• 19.mention of the relation between emotions and facial expressions

Questions 20 – 24

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 20–24 on your answer sheet.

Questions 25 – 26

Choose TWO letters, A–E.

Write the correct letters in boxes 25 and 26 on your answer sheet.

• 25-26.Which TWO of the following statements are true according to Ekman’s theory?
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