Facial Expressions

Facial expressions are one channel of nonverbal communication. Facial expressions can function as paralinguistic signals—such as when one raises one or both eyebrows to signal a question—but most frequently have been studied as a means to express emotions. Emotional facial expressions are an important source of information that frequently dominates information derived from other nonverbal channels such as posture or tone of voice. In relationships, facial expressions often play an important role. For example, smiling is an important signal for affiliation, and the absence of smiles in marital conflict can escalate conflict.

The study of facial expression has been characterized by a number of controversies. This entry provides a brief summary of the current state of the literature and outlines the important roles facial expressions play in human interaction.

The first person to systematically study and describe facial expressions and their possible meaning was Charles Darwin in his book On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. He considered facial expressions to be both directly useful for the organism (e.g., the eyes are wide open in fear to facilitate information uptake), and an important source of information for others by alerting them to the intentions of the expresser (e.g., bared teeth in an angry dog signal an intention to fight).

Darwin considered facial expressions as evolved, and he necessarily assumed clear parallels and antecedents to human emotions in the emotions of animals and presumed human emotion expressions to be universal. Research in the early 20th century, however, failed to find a systematic link between emotional states and facial expressions. The contradictory research findings led Jerome Bruner and Renato Tagiuri to conclude in 1954 that there was little clear evidence for the recogniz-ability of emotional expressions. This view remained basically unchanged until 1972 when Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen, and Phoebe Ellsworth wrote a book to explicitly vindicate Darwin. They revisited the early literature and noted methodological problems with most failures to support Darwin's contentions. Based on this and some of their own findings, they concluded that emotional expressions are indeed universal and directly associated with underlying emotional states. In the following decades, the notion that at least so-called basic emotions are universally expressed and recognized was largely accepted. However, the question of what emotional facial expressions actually express and whether they do so universally is still strongly disputed.