Are You Threatening Me? |
People often see emotions in faces where none may be present.
Emotion perception of neutral faces may have differing consequences for men and women.
Not every facial expression is meant for others—resist over-interpreting neutral faces.
I have been thinking about faces again—what they say, what we see in them, and how closely those two things are related. As someone who frequently hears things like “what are you mad about?” and “you look like you want to say something” (derogatory) when I feel as though my mind is in a nearly blank, nirvana-esque state, I have a particular personal interest in the topic. Some of my best friends have told me they were convinced I hated them before they got to know me. Years ago, our culture referred to my condition using a moderately profane (and pretty clearly misogynistic) abbreviation for my condition: RBF. I guess for me, maybe we can call it Resting Bastard Face?
In any case, the eleven of you who follow my work may know that my interest in phenomena such as these is also professional. I have published work in which I examine personality judgments made from photographs of faces (e.g., Beer, 2013, 2014), and I am far from alone in my interest in what can be conveyed by the face (e.g., Naumann et al., 2009; Engell, Todorov, & Haxby, 2010). Rather than recapitulate some of these findings (in short, there is some evidence that your level of extraversion is somewhere in your face, somehow), I think it may be instructive for our current purposes to instead summarize some anecdotes from doing this kind of work.
Reactions to "Neutral" Faces
Years ago, as part of an ambitious (and thus only partially completed) project, I asked research participants to pose for 6 photographs in which they were asked to look, separately: happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid, and neutral. The idea was that I would use these photos in future studies of personality judgment, and I did. In my first large scale study using these photos I decided to display the neutral expression to participants. This was an effort to reduce problems with individual differences in expressivity/direction-following/theatrical training/etc. I........