UNMASKING THE ACE : A guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues by PAUL EKMAN and WALLACE V. FRIESEN pdf

What This Book Is About

This book is about faces and feelings-your own and those of the people around you. The first focus is on wrhat the feelings look like, in other people’s faces and in your own. Photographs show the facial blueprints of the major emotions-howr surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness are registered by changes in the forehead, eyebrow’s, eyelids, cheeks, nose, lips, and chin. Common confusions that plague the recognition of expressions of emotions are clarified by pictures highlighting the differences between surprise and fear, anger and disgust, sadness and fear.

The subtleties of facial expressions of emotion are revealed in pictures that show the family of expressions for each feeling. Surprise, for example, is an emotion with a big family. There is not one surprise facial expression, but many-questioning surprise, dumbfounded surprise, dazed surprise, slight, moderate, and extreme surprise. The complexities of facial expressions are shown in photographs of how- different emotions can blend into a single facial expression to show sad-angry expressions, angry-afraid expressions, surprise-fearful expressions, and so forth.

You can use this information about the blueprints of facial expression to better understand the feelings of others, even when they are trying not to reveal their feelings (Chapter 11 on “Facial Deceit”). Or you can use the knowledge of the blueprints of facial expression to learn about your own face, to become more aware of what your face is telling you about how- you feel and what your face is telling others. Chapter 12, “Checking Your Own Facial Expressions,” describes how you can determine whether your facial expressions are characterized by a particular style. For example, are you a facial withholder (never showing anything on your face), an unwitting expressor (not knowing you are showing a feeling when you do so), or a substitute expressor (thinking you are showing an angry face when, in fact, you look sad)?

The blueprints of facial expression, whether used to understand others or yourself, is then the first focus of this book. The second focus is the feelings themselves. Although everyone uses the terms anger, fear, sadness, etc., few people really understand fully their own experience of these emotions.

For example, what is it really like to be afraid? What does it feel like in your body? What situations make you afraid? Can you always anticipate when you will be afraid? Can you be both afraid and angry at the same time? When you are afraid, do you get aggressive, withdrawn, or thoughtful? Do you laugh fear off, or do you break out in hives? Do you ever enjoy being afraid -watching a horror movie, for example? Do other people react the same way you do when they are afraid? Does the same thing happen to their breathing? Do the same situations that make you afraid make others afraid? Or do you sometimes think or say, “I can’t understand why he was afraid; that wouldn’t bother me” or “I can’t understand why she wasn’t afraid; I was terrified.”

Most people would have a difficult time answering such questions, at least about some of the emotions. This may happen when you are, to quote the cliche, out of touch with your feelings. This can also happen when you are in touch with your feelings but don’t realize the extent to which your experience of an emotion is unique. There is usually one emotion, and maybe more, that you do not share openly, describing the feeling to others. 11 might be an emotion you in some way dread experiencing, or can’t control, or habitually never think about. Or it may be an emotion you experience keenly but completely privately.

You may discover, for example, after extended contact with an intimate, that what distresses you does not distress him. After the courtship is over, a marriage may founder when the mates discover they not only feel and express anger differently but that the one who explodes can’t tolerate the one who holds it in, or the one with the long fuse can’t accept the one with the short fuse.

The second focus of the book is upon just these issues, describing in detail the experience of each of the emotions. 11 provides as much as we know about how these emotions can be experienced in daily life. You can use this information to learn about your own emotional experiences, the things you share with others and the way in which you differ. You may find out about experiences you are missing. And you may discover the basis for some of your feelings which you have never fully understood. You can use this information also to understand other people’s feelings, to have a basis other than your own emotional experience for comprehending what an emotion may be like for another human being.

Contents

Introduction
1. Why mistakes are made in understanding facial expressions of emotion
2. Research on facial expressions of emotion
3. Surprise
4. Fear
5. Disgust
6. Anger
7. Happiness
8. Sadness
9. Practice faces
10. Facial deceit
11. Checking your own facial expression
12. Conclusion

Appendix I: the facial blueprint photographs
Appendix II: practice photos for chapter 10
Appendix III: log and judge sheets

Language: English
Format: PDF
Pages: 226
Size: 1.95 MB
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