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Facial Expressions

Chapter · December 2015

DOI: 10.1002/9781118540190.wbeic105

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Facial Expressions
Valerie Manusov
University of Washington, USA

The face is the place where we “meet” other people. That is, we look to others’ faces and
their expressions to identify and engage with them, as they do with us. We often recog-
nize someone else by looking at his or her face; we look at that person’s face when we
talk with him or her; and we search what we see in his or her face to find out answers to
many of our questions about the person, his or her state of mind, and the way he or she
feels about us. In his book, About face (Cole, 1998), Jonathan Cole shows just how
­poignant this process is: When people, through illness or accident, lose their ability
to move their facial muscles, they also typically lose their interpersonal connection to
others as those others come to believe that there is no one left “behind” the face. Thus,
for sighted people at least, the face is where we look and how we engage with other
people when we are in interpersonal interactions. Indeed, many people give more
credence to what we “say” with our faces than to any other communicative channel, a
phenomenon known as facial primacy. It is therefore not surprising that scholars from
a range of fields, but most notably from communication and psychology, have studied
the nature and interpersonal functions of facial movements extensively. This entry helps
to reveal what we know—and what is contested—within this large body of scholarship.

The nature of facial movement

The face is made up of static features, such as our skin color and nose size, along with
dynamic features: the movements that we make with our face (as well as other things
that can change instantly, such as blushing). The static features of our faces are impor-
tant to our interpersonal interactions as they suggest to us who the other person is,
whether we will agree with them, and the degree to which we will like them. Such static
cues, tied as they are to our impressions of others, can be problematic in that they
stir our stereotypes, including responding (usually negatively) to those whose facial
­features are stigmatized (devalued by a larger culture).
Despite the importance of static facial features, however, the dynamic cues are the
ones most likely to affect how interpersonal interactions play out. Paul Ekman, one of
the primary researchers on facial expressions, asserts that there are 43 muscles and
thousands of ways that the face can move. He also claims in his book Telling lies: Clues
to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage (Ekman, 1985), that these dynamic
movements are of two types: those we intend to send and that we, at least to some

The International Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Communication, First Edition.

Edited by Charles R. Berger and Michael E. Roloff.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
DOI:10.1002/9781118540190.wbeic0105
2

degree control, and those we do not intend to send nor control. That is, many of our
dynamic facial movements are the result of our purposefully sending a certain message
(e.g., showing happiness), whereas others may be sent without our awareness and even,
sometimes, against our will (e.g., showing a truth we wish to conceal). It is these
dynamic movements that are the focus of this entry.
Facial movements are typically referred to as facial expressions and as such are seen
primarily to be expressions of our emotions. And they certainly can express what we
are feeling or what we want others to believe we are feeling. The tie between the face
and emotional expression led Ekman and Friesen (1975) to develop a taxonomy of
­different types of people based on their style of expressing emotions in their interper-
sonal exchanges. For instance, withholders tend to downplay or repress the display of
whatever emotion they are feeling. Frozen‐affect expressors are people who usually have
one expression on their face (e.g., a scowl) no matter what they are feeling. Blanked
expressors show no expression, even if they are feeling something. Revealors show what
they are feeling whenever they feel it. Other expressor types are unwitting and substitute
expressors.
This interpersonal function of facial behavior—and some of the controversy around
it—will be discussed in more detail further on. But perhaps more than anything else
they can convey, facial movements function interpersonally as conversational signals
(Ekman, 1985), facial displays (Chovil, 2005), or social tools (Fridlund & Russell, 2006).
Such signals, displays or tools occur very quickly and precisely and involve “a movement
or change in one or more areas of the face (i.e., brows, eyes, nose, mouth) as a person
engages in dialogue” with another (Chovil, 2005, p. 175).
They also take various forms. Within the larger set of facial signals, Ekman identified
facial illustrators (facial cues that provide a sort of model for what is being discussed
­verbally), regulators (cues that help guide the pace of a conversation), emblems (symbolic
and socially agreed-upon movements, such as a wink, that mean something very
particular to a set of speakers), adaptors or manipulators (movements that reflect a state
of being, such as biting one’s lip and may be cathartic in that they can provide release
for that state), and affect displays (those cues that show an emotion). Chovil provides
four general categories: syntactic displays (connected to the tone of what someone is
saying but do not add content and the most common form of facial signal she observed);
speaker comments (cues on the speaker’s face that add to what he or she is saying, such
as “you should take this with a grain of salt”); speaker illustrators (visual pictures of
what is being said, consistent with Ekman’s category); and listener comments (usually
indicating that the listener is responding to the speaker in some way). Such displays do
things (function) for conversants such as show that they have a question, that they want
to change the subject, and that they agree or disagree with the other. Chovil also talked
about facial adaptors, as did Ekman, but argued that they serve a different purpose than
managing conversation (i.e., that they were nonlinguistic). The many forms that facial
movements can take led Fridlund and Russell (2006) to call them “exquisitely complex.”
This complexity is enhanced when looking to see whether men and women use
facial expressions in similar ways. In her review of sex differences and similarities in
nonverbal communication, Judith Hall (2006) suggested that the differences may be
more in our heads than in our behavior. That is, we have stereotypes that men smile
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less, gaze less, and are emotionally less expressive than are women. Moreover, we
p­erceive that women will laugh more, smile less authentically, be better able to recog-
nize faces, and be better expressors overall than are men. In her research, however, she
found that across studies, women’s tendency to “smile more” was negligible as was their
use of inauthentic smiles. Women are, however, more facially expressive overall than
are men, and they do gaze more, but particularly at one another. Both the beliefs and
the realities of facial differences between men and women are tied to the ways in which
facial expressions serve, or function, to tie our identities to our behavior.
The concept that facial expressions can serve certain communicative functions
(i.e., do things for us as communicators) is in line with a more general view of what
nonverbal communication means for us within our interpersonal interactions. Facial
cues are part of many interpersonal “tasks,” such as providing the basis on which we
may judge another’s personality, reveal our cultural and other social identities, suggest
our attitude to and about another, and help the flow of interaction through the way we
use our mouth, eyes, and head. The cues may also reveal or conceal the truth from
others. But this is a complicated process, and we often make mistakes when we use the
face to assess another’s veracity.

Facial expression of emotions

Whether we should do so or not, many people are most likely to connect facial
­movements with a particular interpersonal communication function: the expression of
­emotions. Charles Darwin is most recognized with bringing the capacity for the face to
reveal and communicate emotion to our attention in his well‐known book from 1872,
The expression of emotion in man and animals (Darwin, 1872). Well before Darwin,
however, Aristotle also wrote at length about the “passions” revealed on our faces. More
recently, Paul Ekman has likewise been credited with showing that the display of some
emotions is universal, with about six emotions exhibited on people’s faces in similar
ways across cultures. Specifically, he and his colleagues have found evidence that there
are six universal ­emotions that all people from all cultures will decode similarly on
others’ face: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Across a number of
studies, Ekman and his colleagues found that people were able to recognize most of
these six “basic” emotions when they viewed someone expressing them in a photo-
graph. This important (though controversial) claim has led, erroneously, to people
asserting that nonverbal communication more broadly is a universal language, used
and understood by all in the same way.
Ekman is also credited with showing, however, that there are myriad ways to reflect
any emotion, many that do not involve the face (i.e., sadness can be displayed with
tears, a turned‐down mouth and brows, silence, wailing, slumped shoulders, shaking,
and the like). More importantly, and although it may be natural to display certain
facial expressions when experiencing an emotion, Ekman has argued that such
natural expressions may be tempered by what he termed display rules set in place by a
particular culture. In some places, for example, it may not be deemed appropriate to
show sadness in public, even when one is feeling that way. So, people may learn
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to  mask their actual emotion either by using facial expressions to display another
emotion that they do not actually feel. They may also display the emotion but do so at
a level of intensity that belies what they are really feeling. They may, for instance, know
that a display rule is to show happiness for someone else’s good fortune, and even if
they are feeling only slightly happy, they may exaggerate their reflection of it, a process
called overintensification. Or, if they feel happier than a display rule suggests they
should, they may deintensify their display.
The idea that people can display (or modify) what they are really feeling or
show  something that they are not feeling led to a distinction between felt and false
communication of emotion. Felt displays are those that reflect what a person is actually
feeling, though they may also be exaggerated in form so that they are more apparent to
an audience. False expressions are displays that suggest that the user feels something
that he or she does not. The most well‐known distinction of felt versus false emotions
has been documented in studies of smiles. When people are smiling because they feel
happiness or some other very positive affect, they are likely to use a Duchenne smile, an
authentic expression distinguishable from a false expression by, among other things,
wrinkles around the smiler’s eyes. Other “automatic” nonverbal cues that can express
happiness include a higher vocal pitch, a “lighter” walking style, closer interpersonal
distances, and more laughter.
The argument that the face will naturally express universal and “authentic” emo-
tions, such as happiness, becomes more complicated in other ways. In particular,
researchers have found that certain emotions that are argued to have a universal base
are not actually displayed on people’s faces when people are alone, even if they are
feeling a particular emotion. The cues, particularly those that reflect happiness, tend to
occur only when people are in the presence of others. People are, for example, more
likely to laugh, smile, and show pride on their faces when there is an “audience” for
their emotion than when there is none. This has led some researchers to argue that
facial expressions are less about the reveal of real emotions than they are about showing
others how we feel.
The influence of two or more people engaging together also allows for another notable
pattern to arise: the appearance of what is known as motor mimicry. Janet Bavelas and
her colleagues (Bavelas, Black, Lemery, & Mullett, 1986) showed the ways in which
­listeners in interactions act out what the speaker is describing. So, as one person talks
about her grief over her father’s recent loss, the other interactant shows on his face, not
necessarily how he feels about what is described, but that he knows how the speaker is
feeling. As such, the face is able to show that the listener is listening well, an important
interpersonal skill or competence, as well as the listener’s ability to be empathic.
These lines of research have led some scholars to assert, as noted earlier in this
entry, that facial behavior is there to do many other things for us as interpersonal com-
municators, well beyond the expression of one’s own emotion. Some researchers even
question whether it is a specific emotion, such as surprise, or more general and undif-
ferentiated affect (i.e., feeling positive or negative)—or even more neutral signals—that
is revealed on our faces when we interact with others. Perhaps farthest afield from the
view that facial cues are primarily (or even largely) for the display of emotions, Fridlund
and Russell (2006) report on their behavioral ecology view (BEV) of facial display.
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They argue that, rather than displaying emotions, most facial movements are better
conceptualized as reflections of social motives, or signals that influence others’ behavior.
In their work, they show evidence for the face signifying myriad interpersonal ­messages,
including readiness to affiliate, appease, attack, or escape, or to show superiority over
another. Motley (1993) likewise argues that the dynamic facial cues most likely to be
used during interactions are what he describes as “interjections,” quick looks that show
disagreement or that the other should go on with his or her talk. Motley also found that
facial expressions, when they occurred in the “ongoingness” of interaction (rather than
in a still photograph), were very difficult to identity. For these researchers, the face’s
role is more about supporting what is being said than it is about standing on its own to
display an emotion or some other clear meaning.

Capturing facial movement

All of the arguments and conclusions discussed here are drawn from a range of methods
for studying nonverbal expressions. Many of the claims about the universality (or not) of
facial expressions come from what are called judgment studies. In this research para-
digm, photographs are taken of people expressing (based on real or posed) emotions
and then assessing whether observers of those photographs get the emotion “right.” The
most detailed of these judgment methodologies is called the profile of nonverbal sensi-
tivity (PONS), developed by Ekman and his colleagues. Research using this method
reveals a strong ability across cultures for people to recognize emotions, e­ specially when
the photographs on which their assessment are based are of people from within their
own culture (although this finding, too, is contested). The fact that this methodology
uses posed and still photos, often with a limited set of judgments from which to choose,
has led it to be criticized, although it has also led to a number of important research find-
ings, as Matsumoto (2006) reviews well. To get more “real life” reactions to stimuli (and
therefore, ostensibly, more true‐to‐life emotional expressions), and to assess encoding
(sending) rather than decoding (receiving sensitivity), Ross Buck introduced the slide‐
viewing technique (for a review, see Buck, 2005). In this method, people (the commu­
nication senders) watch emotionally loaded slides, such as a severe facial injury, and are
assessed by raters on how well they express the emotion they are expected to feel.
More nuanced capturing of the specific movements that go into any facial expression
is often done through Ekman and Friesen’s (1978) facial action coding system
(FACS).  This complex system requires a great deal of training, but those with such
training are able to make fine distinctions in the occurrence of thousands of cues
known as action units. It is a particularly helpful means through which to capture
microexpressions: those cues that are so quick and small that they may go unnoticed by
the human eye. That facial cues are typically coded from videotapes for this system
allows for the greater likelihood of capturing such momentary expressions. That so
many of the cues that occurred on the face were, when combined, considered e­ motional
displays led Gottman (1996) to create the specific affect coding system (SPAFF). It has
been used to predict divorce and marital quality in couples. These very specific and
detailed coding systems also allow researchers to capture emotional blends. In our
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interpersonal interactions, we often experience and/or wish to communicate a range

of  emotions at once. A political figure may feel (or wish to display) anger, sadness,
­compassion, and determination all at once for his or her audience. Likewise, a father
may feel both happiness and grief when his child starts to walk and is therefore “growing
up fast.” These facial blends may be very difficult to read or decode correctly in our
interactions, but these coding schemes may be better able to capture them.
Display rules can be coded through a range of methods, including David Matsumoto’s
display rule assessment inventory (DRAI), that allows coders to classify what display
rule is occurring when “participants [choose] a behavioral response when they experi-
ence different emotions in different social situations” (Matsumoto, 2006, p. 226).
Participants in studies using the DRAI are asked what they would do if experiencing
one of 14 emotional terms (two terms each applied to what he argues are the seven
basic emotions: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise).
Display rules also develop within the “culture” of a relationship can be assessed with
Krystyna Aune’s (Aune, 2005) measure. In her measure, members of relational pairs are
asked to report on their own and one another’s expressions or emotions, the degree to
which they believe they or their partner actually experienced, as well as how appro-
priate it was, in their mind, to be expressed as it was.
Whereas several nonverbal behaviors may be a part of emotional expressions, partic-
ularly the body and voice, various measures that work at least in part to capture our use
of the face have been developed to assess how skilled people are in their expression and
perception of emotion. Indeed, there are also a range of self‐assessments of emotional
expressivity and receptivity. These include the affective communication test, the
­emotional expressivity scale, the Berkeley expressivity questionnaire, and the affect
intensity measure. All are used to determine how well people are able to use emotional
expressions as they engage with others in interaction. This line of inquiry is important,
as nonverbal skill, like other forms of communication competence, is tied to an array of
beneficial outcomes, such as achievement in schools, assessments of likability, being
found nonguilty in a trial, and dating success.

Conclusion

Facial expressions are often seen as the entry point for interpersonal interactions. They
help to invite people to engage (or not), affect who we see another person to be, display
emotions (real or not), and allow us to navigate through our communication with another.

SEE ALSO: Facial Feedback Hypothesis; Forms of Affectionate Communication;

Gestures and Kinesics; Interpersonal Communication Skill/Competence

References

Aune, K. S. (2005). Assessing display rules in relationships. In V. Manusov (Ed.), The sourcebook
of nonverbal measures: Going beyond words (pp. 151–161). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
 7

Bavelas, J. B., Black, A., Lemery, C. R., & Mullett, J. (1986). “I show how you feel”: Motor
­mimicry as a communicative act. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 322–329.
doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.50.2.322
Buck, R. (2005). The slide‐viewing paradigm. In V. Manusov (Ed.), The sourcebook of nonverbal
measures: Going beyond words (pp. 457–470). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Chovil, N. (2005). Measuring conversational facial displays. In V. Manusov (Ed.), The source-
book of nonverbal measures: Going beyond words (pp. 173–188). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cole, J. D. (1998). About face. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Darwin, C. R. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London, UK: John
Murray.
Ekman, P. (1985). Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage. New York,
NY: Norton.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face: A guide to recognizing emotions from
facial expressions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1978). The facial action coding system: A technique for the
measurement of facial movement. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Fridlund, A. J., & Russell, J. A. (2006). The functions of facial expressions: What’s in a face? In
V.  Manusov & M. L. Patterson (Eds.), The Sage handbook of nonverbal communication
(pp. 299–319). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gottman, J. M. (Ed.) (1996). What predicts divorce: The measures. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Matsumoto, D. (2006). Culture and nonverbal behavior. In V. Manusov & M. L. Patterson (Eds.),
The Sage handbook of nonverbal communication (pp. 219–235). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Motley, M. (1993). Facial affect and verbal context in conversation: Facial expression as inter­
jection. Human Communication Research, 20, 3–40. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2958.1993.tb00314.x

Further reading

Andrew, R. J. The origins of facial expression. Scientific American, 213, 88–94.

Riggio, R. E., & Riggio, H. R. (2005). Self‐report measures of emotional and nonverbal expres-
siveness. In V. Manusov (Ed.), The sourcebook of nonverbal measures: Going beyond words (pp.
105–111). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Zebrowitz, L. A. (1997). Reading faces: Window to the soul? Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Valerie Manusov is professor of communication at the University of Washington,

USA. She teaches courses in interpersonal, nonverbal, and relational communication
and communication research methods. She is the coeditor of The Sage Handbook of
Nonverbal Communication and the editor of The Sourcebook of Nonverbal Measures:
Going Beyond Words. Her work has been published in Human Communication Research,
Communication Monographs, and Communication Research.

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