Face Reading

Face to face interactions are improved with better skills in understanding facial expression.

You may be visiting this site to improve your ability to detect and understand nonverbal communication by reading the face. Perhaps your job involves interactions with people where superior communications produces better outcomes, such as more satisfied clients and customers, higher sales rate, or better employee relations. Nonverbal communication plays an important part in such interactions. You may have read about the fascinating abilities of some extraordinary people who use the information in the face to make crucial decisions that change lives. Do you wonder whether such an amazing face reading ability can be acquired? Yes, research evidence and anecdotal reports indicate that everyone can improve their ability to see and understand facial nonverbal communication signs that are significant for understanding other people. Through study and training, regardless of initial skill level, detecting and interpreting facial signs becomes easier. Such performance improvements, however, do not come without effort. The following provides an outline on how to use this site and other sources to improve your face reading abilities. The outline is repeated in the Navigator on the left.

The Signs

The first step in face reading is to understand what signs there are in the face. For an overview of the kinds of information the face can provide, see the information and interpretations of faces on the Information page in the Expression Section. The face is a source of various kinds of signs, and you want to be able to perceive the ones relevant to your interests, and to discard or filter out the ones that are not. Signs of the face can be difficult to spot for several reasons. The most significant mistake people make in detecting signs is to confuse one set of signs with another, for example, taking some permanent structural characteristic of the face to reflect a transient mood or emotion. The FAQ is a place to start surveying the signs of the face. You can also get a more general view of the face's messages from the NSF Report .

Detecting the Signs

After you acquire a good understanding of what the different message systems in the face are, and which one is relevant to your concerns, you are ready to study the signs for the nonverbal communication messages of interest to you. If you are interested in signs of emotion, you will study the elementary behaviors that the face produces, its muscular actions. Start by examining the facial actions on the Muscular Actions page in the Expression Section. There is much more to discover beyond this short introduction, and if you have a serious or professional interest in the area of expressive behaviors, you may want to purchase the bible of facial behavior, Facial Action Coding System (FACS). You can follow links in the FACS Section that will take you to sample pages of FACS, which provide a view of what FACS is like. If you are interested in signs that relate to more lasting characteristics of the person, then you will study the permanent, physiognomic signs of the face. Start with the pages in the Physiognomy Section. One problem with physiognomic signs is the great number of different signs claimed to be useful, but for which there is no evidence. The Visage application illustrates a small selection of the large number of these signs in a database. Signs produced by muscular action can also reflect more permanent characteristics as well as transient emotion or mood, so you may also need to study them to round out your skills. In addition, in the Facets Section, other, specific signs in the face are discussed, such as signs of aging, signs of attractiveness, and signs of health and disease. Detecting signs is most difficult when deception is employed, and you can read a summary of the difficulties involving deception.

Understanding the Signs

The third step in understanding the face is to interpret the signs that you detect in terms of psychologically relevant concepts. If you are observing muscular actions related to emotion, you need to know how to assign emotional meanings to the behaviors. Usually, this step involves assigning an emotion category, such as anger, fear, or sadness, to the facial expression. You can see how this works for some obvious signs and basic emotion categores on the Expressions page in the Emotion Section. For professionals in facial behavior who understand Facial Action Coding System, the FACSAID system can be used to lookup the meanings of FACS-coded facial expressions. If you are interested in physiognomic signs, Visage provides some meanings for a few signs, but there is a vast number of purported signs, for which little evidence is available. To gain expertise in understanding any specific facial sign system takes years of study and practice.

Integrating the Knowledge

Perhaps the hardest step of all in understanding nonverbal communication is knowing what to do with the information you gather from the face. How do you respond when you know, by using your skills in interpreting faces, that your friend is angry, but is trying to hide it from you or is trying to deceive you? Such decisions depend upon other types of information and other abilities you may have for interacting with others, which are known as your social skills. Such issues are of great significance, a lifetime occupation for professionals such as psychotherapists and social workers. You can learn these skills through informal education such as reading books or by enrolling in psychological and professional courses of study. You can also learn more about the communication process and the signals that are used by participating in group psychotherapy or small group sessions or enrolling in professional communications training seminars. You can find links to educational resources at social psychology sites such as www.socialpsychology.org and you may find appropriate small group sessions or group psychotherapy at your local community mental health providers or at your educational institution or through your health maintanance plan. The DataFace Library has a number of links to online resources for integrating the facial information you collect. There are many books and other sources of information about these topics available through the Bookstore.