One recent weekend on Telegraph Avenue, near the University of California at Berkeley, I threaded my way past white people in dreadlocks selling macrame and a man doing crunches on the sidewalk. And I made a point of not looking anybody in the face. Call it self-defense.
Or maybe it was dereliction of duty, because looking at faces was the reason I had come to California.
Facial expressions are the universal language of the human soul. Understanding what they mean can determine whether you land the job, close the deal, make friends, win fights, talk her into dinner at your place, charm her pants off, charm her parents, live surrounded by people you love -- or die alone listening to an $8-an-hour orderly crack rude jokes outside the door. But it had lately dawned on me that in my own life, looking at faces was something I generally avoided.
So now I would take faces, well, head-on. I'd signed up for a weeklong course in the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS, which breaks down human facial expressions into a series of muscle movements called action units, or AUs. The teacher, psychologist Erika Rosenberg, Ph.D., had warned me that she wouldn't be teaching us how to read emotions. Instead, we would be going back to basics, charting the bulges, knots, furrows, wrinkles, stretching, bagging, and pouching of facial flesh -- the moving parts of human emotion. Rosenberg added, "Your life is going to change as a result of learning FACS. You will never look at people the same way again."
And I figured I needed to change, for reasons I blamed partly on harried modern life: Putting on a bland and inoffensive airport face is how we go from point A to point B (or from Telegraph Avenue to the hotel) with the least possible hassle. But we end up avoiding other people's facial expressions for roughly the same reason -- and the result is that most of us are dismal at reading faces. On a standard test we typically mistake half of the facial expressions we see, transposing basic emotions like fear and surprise, or calling it anger when it's really disgust. Even CIA polygraphists do no better than guesswork at the trickier business of using facial expressions to separate straight talk from lies.
Doctors and nurses do worse than family members at recognizing pain in a patient's face. In the workplace, bosses often seem oblivious to all facial expressions. Imagine being a zookeeper and not understanding that when the leopard pricks up its ears and bends them back, it's thinking about having you for dinner. Small wonder that romantic partners have so much trouble figuring each other out.
Words are part of the problem. They distract us from what faces would tell us if we paid attention. So your girlfriend says, "I'm fine," and you say, "Okay, cool," without noticing the irritated little tightening at one corner of her mouth. Or you fail to pick up the disappointed arch of her eyebrows when she unwraps her birthday present. In one lie-detection study, patients whose cerebral damage made them less attentive to speech became better at reading facial expressions. They picked out the liars 73 percent of the time -- an astonishing accuracy rate. Shutting off the words helped them focus on what faces revealed.
And the solution to this word problem? Given the alternatives (have a stroke or remain oblivious), I was hoping a course in facial expressions might be a better way.
The next morning, 15 fellow face watchers and I assembled around a horseshoe of tables with our laptops open in front of us. Rosenberg soon had us scrunching up our noses in pig-snout disgust (that's an AU 9), or puckering up like kids making kissy-face for the camera (that's an AU 18). We used hand mirrors to see if we'd gotten it right, and it was a little unsettling to look up now and then and see the people around me randomly expressing what seemed like anger or contempt or delight at their own reflections.
