Facial Expressions

We can tell how other people are feeling just by looking at them. When someone is happy, they smile. When they are sad, they frown.  But where do these facial expressions come from? Are they learned or are they innate? David Matsumoto studied these questions for years in his culture and emotion research lab at San Francisco State. Facial expressions are so important because they are part of a non-verbal communication system that we all have; that we use extensively when we communicate with others. Facial expression comment on the word in many different ways so that you know that a person may be joking, or they may be very serious. I think this is why we have emoticons in email. Facial expressions are very difficult to study in a lab because when people are in a lab they are watching what they’re doing. And so, often times, what you get in a laboratory is not what occurs in real life. David realized there was a better setting to study facial expressions; the 2004 Summer Olympic Games. It just so happened he was headed there anyway as researcher for the National Judo Federation. The Olympics is the perfect place to do one of these studies because it’s real life, it’s naturalistic, it’s very emotional. He then turned his eye and the camera toward the Paralympic Games. By studying the expression of the blind athletes in the Paralympic Games and then comparing them to the expression of the athletes in the sighted…the regular…. Olympic Games, we can tell whether they have the same expressions or not. And the result? Those who won showed signs of true enjoyment, those who lost showed sadness or distress or fear or anger. And they were the exact same facial muscle movements that occurred in both the sighted and the blind. They occurred at both exactly the same times and exactly the same ways. And they differentiated winners and losers in exactly the same ways. And so the findings were amazingly similar. So the study of the blind athletes in the Paralympics Games show us conclusively that the source of facial expressions and emotions must be resident in some innate biological program that we all have, that we are born with, and that we have from birth. And that everybody….. all around the world….. as long as you are a human…. has that. And I think that that’s a very powerful message that this study shows. So, then next time you see someone smile, or frown, remember you are seeing an expression of their DNA.