The Faces Have It

Speaker: Emily Wight

Think about the last difficult conversation you had. You were listening to the words, maybe even choosing your own words carefully, trying to say the right thing. But what if the most important part of that conversation wasn't what was being said at all? What if the person in front of you was telling you exactly how they felt - and you missed it completely? There's a researcher who spent decades studying human faces and what he found is both fascinating and a little unsettling: people are broadcasting their inner world constantly, in ways they can't fully control or hide, and most of us have no idea how to read it. Not because we're bad people. Because nobody taught us how to look. 

This Sunday we're going to learn how to actually see the people right in front of us - and why that skill might be the piece that builds beautiful connection.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

So we also have an all all female tech team as well. So the ladies are taken over. This is what's happening. That's why we had Bryce and Joe open for us, because you know. Representation matters. That's right. That's right. My name's Emily. Normally when I get up here, I'm part of the charitable giving team. So I just wanted to warn you that I am not going to spend the next 25 to 30 minutes asking you for money. So don't worry. Just take a deep breath. It'll be fine. We're going to start talking today a little bit more about detoxifying our relationships, about how we can get better at being with the people around us. So I'm going to tell you a little story first. I work at a university and at work I deal with students who are in stressful situations on a regular basis. I have them coming into my office in varying degrees of emotional states. Sometimes they're upset, sometimes they're actually coming in to celebrate something, sometimes they're terrified, kind of runs the gamut. And I have a really great track record of noticing what it is they're bringing to me, what kind of energy they walk into my office with, and making them feel seen and heard. I can tell if the things that they are talking to me about are making them sad or angry or scared, or if they're super excited. The conversation stays calm and regulated. And usually students leave my office feeling supported, feeling heard, sometimes with ideas for what their next steps are going to be. But at home, not so much. I am not as good at this with my family as I am at work. Most recently, I really sucked at this in a conversation with my daughter. She was making something on her sewing machine. She's very creative. She makes all kinds of clothes and really cool stuff that would never even enter my brain. And her sewing machine wasn't working. It was late in the evening. She asked me to come down and see if I could help her fix it. I was busy troubleshooting, making suggestions, really task-focused, right? Just kind of figuring out we're going to get this machine working. And I completely missed how our conversation was making her feel until everything blew up. It seemed to me that all of a sudden there was a whole lot of yelling, mostly me, and there was tears, her and me. And I found myself getting defensive and not responding well at all. So how on earth did it get this bad this quick? I was blindsided in the moment, but I shouldn't have been. I went into the conversation thinking that it was about the sewing machine and that I was just there to fix a thing. I wasn't paying attention to how she was feeling as I was working towards this fix. And I missed an opportunity to respond to her well, and I made her feel invisible by not noticing her emotions. I'm sure you've been in a conversation with someone who has not seen you, where you are saying something and they're just responding the wrong way. They're taking the conversation in a direction that you didn't expect and is the opposite of what you need. And you may be left feeling like you're talking to a brick wall. You're like, are we even in the same room together right now? Unfortunately, this happens all the time. I'm sure you've felt invisible. And some bad news. I'm sure you've done this to others as well. To this point in our series about relationship detoxification, we have learned and talked about some of the sort of general ideas of the toxic behaviors that can make future you suffer. Now, Vince had an aged picture of himself up on the screen. I'm not going to give you that little tidbit of myself. So we're just going to have to imagine, imagine me older, imagine each of us older into the future. But we learned about how the things that we do now are going to impact not only us, but all of our people as well as we move into the future. So we can't just keep pushing stuff off, right? We've learned about bids for connection last week. If you were here, you would have seen Vince and I kind of practice a little bit at the end. I threw him a couple curveballs, but he also had some really great examples of ways that we can bid for connection and respond to those bids. And we learned that we can either turn toward, turn against, or turn away from a bid. We want to be able to skillfully respond to bids so that future us can enjoy the fruits of that labor. So there is another way for us to do these conversations, a way that mothers and daughters can fix broken sewing machines without a fight, a way that you could respond to a friend that really gets underneath their words to get to what they're feeling, a way that you can make collaboration with your coworkers smoother and have people want to work with you. If you, I mean, if you're a people-ly person and you want that. I know some people are not, so I just want to recognize that you don't have to go there if you don't want to. But it all comes down to noticing emotions. Luckily for us, there are lots of studies about how humans display emotions. Um, we have got um a book that we're looking at right now by uh a guy named Um Gottman. It is called The Relationship Rescue. It's kind of what we're basing this series on. And Gottman's work is based on the research of uh a guy named Dr. Paul Ekman. So Paul Ekman was looking back at uh how do we how do we display emotion? And is this something that we can look at to inform us about communication? So when I look back at the, we'll call it the sewing machine incident, um, I'm sure that my daughter said one thing to me, you know, help me fix the machine, but I'm also certain that there was something else underneath that ask that was a whole lot more important. And that's the piece that I missed. I needed to see her and how she was feeling in that moment, and then we needed to work together on the fix. But I didn't notice that. So why do we run into this? Sometimes our words don't match our emotions. Maybe a friend tells you that they're fine, but they do it like this. Yeah, I'm fine. Right. And you think, you're clearly lying to me. That is not, that's not the truth here, right? Or maybe your partner's telling you a story about something that happened at work and you're getting angry on their behalf, but that's not matching their energy, not matching their emotion. You don't really know what's going on there. We even see a miscommunication like this happening in the Bible. This is not new. Um, we have a woman named Hannah who is really, really devastated. She's very upset. She's gone to the temple to pray, and a priest named Eli sees her, and in her state, he thinks she's drunk. And he says to her, How long are you going to stay drunk? Sober up. She says, Sir, don't think I'm a bad person. I'm not drunk. I haven't been drinking, but I do feel miserable and terribly upset. Now, when we get it wrong, not everyone we encounter is going to tell us their feelings as clearly as Hannah does in this story. In fact, it's probably the opposite. We won't necessarily know that we have missed something until it all starts going wrong. So, how do we figure it out? This comes back to Gottman and previous to him, Ekman, these researchers, who looked really closely at people. In the 1960s, Dr. Ekman established that certain facial expressions are universal and biologically innate. They are not culturally learned. There are seven core emotional expressions that transcend geography, language, and culture. Those seven expressions are happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and contempt. Humans all over the globe make and understand facial expressions that communicate these emotions. So these facial expressions are also not new. If we look back to the Bible's account of creation, we even have a scene that describes Cain, who is Adam and Eve's son, being upset. And it shows on his face. We don't need to worry about what got him here. He's really upset. And the the text describes this scene and says, and it distressed Cain exceedingly, and he collapsed in countenance. Kind of old language. But if we update that language, our countenance is our facial expression. It's kind of what we're showing to the world. So Cain was really, really upset, and his face fell. Right? We know what that looks like. You know, why the long face, right? We can visualize what that looks like when someone, when someone's face falls, right? So this is uh back as old as time, these facial expressions, they are universally understood. Um, and there is cultural influence that determines whether or not we are allowed to express particular emotions. The influence is also seen in relationships. Um, you may show more anger to your partner than you do to your boss. You may show sadness only with those that you feel the safest with. When people think that they're being watched and there is a particular expectation in place, they will often correct very quickly and not let those emotions show on their face. But when we don't think anyone's watching, those emotional facial expressions come out very clearly. So, you know, if we're all sort of correcting and masking these things, how on earth are we supposed to pick this up in the people that we're talking to? Well, Ekman also discovered that what he calls micro expressions, these um flashes of emotion that will come across your face that lasts sometimes less than a second, but that our brains are able to pick up those really quick flashes of emotion. It's like a leak. So this leak of true feeling, it happens to everyone and it often happens unconsciously without us realizing it. So the way that Gottman uses the foundation of this work is to teach us how to be more effective communicators in our relationships when we notice the emotions that flash across the face of the person we're talking to. We can study these facial expressions, we can learn to recognize them. It does not always come easily. It even though it is biologically innate, that doesn't mean that it cannot be trained or that you should just assume that you already know it. Okay. Sometimes it can feel strange to be studying someone's face. Um, for some time, for some people, eye contact is really difficult. Um, for others, uh, most of us actually, it's hard to look somebody directly in the face when you're having a difficult conversation. Um, so it's not always easy to kind of learn how to pick up on these things. There is a story that um John Gottman tells in his book of how when he was first learning about these facial expressions and how each of them displays on the face, he was he was staring at his partner while she was talking. And she said to him, Would you stop looking at my eyebrows? I am trying to tell you something. So, you know, we will learn to be more subtle about it. We will learn to do this in a more nuanced way. Um, but it it's not always easy at the start, and it does take some practice. I mean, even once we get good at it, what is noticing emotion going to do for someone for us? Like, why was why is this gonna matter? Well, you've heard the expression that, oh, I felt really seen, right? Maybe, maybe you saw a reel on Instagram and you were like, oh wow, how did they get into my life, right? Or somebody that's close to you uh makes a comment or uh acts in a way that just makes you feel seen, right? We know that expression. I feel really seen. Um, to make someone feel seen is more than just noticing them, it it is something that communicates appreciation and value. We're talking about like you matter to me in the moment, right? We have a desire to enter into their experience with them when we are seeing someone. So seeing is the gateway. Once we see the emotion, we can lean into the emotion of the conversation. And when we lean into the emotion of the conversation, we become better communicators. When our response doesn't match the emotion, the people that we're communicating with can feel invisible. We lose effectiveness, it can result in defensiveness or withdrawing and a loss of connection. So pay attention. We want to see the emotion on the face of the person you're talking to. It will help you tune into where they're coming from and how they're reacting to what you're saying. So let's look at what the research shows us. We're gonna look at a bunch of faces and we're gonna talk about what each of these emotions sort of has as key features. Okay, so these are these are clearly um staged photos, right? We didn't just like randomly snap these on the street. So they've got some really good examples, right? They're a little bit exaggerated so that we can really see what's going on, right? Um, let's we'll start on the bright side here for happiness, right? We see happiness, where is she? Oh, key is enjoyment down at the bottom is how they're labeling that one. So um in the bottom corner of your screen, we've got enjoyment. So the key features of the face when somebody is happy or enjoying what they're doing is their cheeks raise, their eyes form those little wrinkles at the corner of our eyes that what we would call crows' feet, right? The corners of the lips pull up and they angle outward, right? I'm sure that you, well, maybe you haven't, but have you ever heard the expression smise? Have you heard of smise? The smile that reaches your eyes. If somebody does not have the smile in their eyes and they only have it in their mouth, it does not look genuine. And we can recognize that, right? We can look at someone and be like, you are faking it, right? So we want to watch the eyes for happiness, for sadness. You find the sad corn, the sad face up there. The inner corners of the eyebrows pull up, the eyelids droop, and the corners of our lips pull downward, right? Your jaw might slightly tremble or drop. Um, but I think she's a really good example of sadness there. For fear, the eyebrows, again, this is why Gottman was staring at his partner's eyebrows. For fear, the eyebrows are raised and slightly pulled together. The upper eyelids are pulled up to expose the whites of the eyes. Sometimes the mouth is open, though sometimes the lips are stretched tightly, but it's mostly about the eyes. In anger, just a slight difference. Instead of being pulled up, the eyebrows are pulled down and together. The eyelids are tensed, they're staring hard, the lips might be pressed tightly together or pulled back in a hard shape. In disgust, this one's got a really good tell. The nose wrinkles. Think of like, oh, that's disgusting. I just smelled something gross. Ugh, disgust. The nose wrinkles, the upper lip is raised, the cheeks raise and tighten the eyes a little bit. But the nose is your key for disgust. In contempt, one side of the mouth raises. It's the only facial expression that is asymmetric. Now, I don't mean to suggest we all have perfectly symmetrical faces, because we do not. We would all look very weird if we did. Um, but this is the only emotional expression that actually doesn't happen bilaterally. So contempt is one side of the mouth. It's like a smirk, an asymmetrical smirk. In surprise, the eyebrows curve high and arch. We can kind of think of that almost cartoonish sort of surprise look, right? The upper eyelids widen, sometimes the jaw drops, sometimes the mouth is open, but even if it's not, the teeth usually part naturally, right? We've got kind of very open face for surprise. So those are our examples. Okay. We're gonna do a little bit of practice. There's uh a quiz if you want, we're just gonna look at a few examples, but there's a quiz on um Paul Ekman's website if you wanted to go look at it uh on your own uh later to kind of check out some more options. It's this is where we're going to get this quiz that we're going to do next. So we're gonna make sure we we point you in the right direction there. So Paul Ekman.com slash quizzes. That's where you want to go look if you want to see it. But we're gonna do a little bit of practice here together. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at a few faces, and then we are going to find the one that is not the expression that I'm asking you for. Okay. Which one of these is not anger? Is what we're gonna start with. So which one of these is not anger? You want to give me some thoughts, some ideas? What do you think? C? Pretty easy one, right? We talked about that wrinkle of the nose for disgust. You got it. Anger is not showing in the nose. So, yes, C is the one that is not angry. Okay, there is no one single way that a face is gonna look when displaying emotion, but the key features do stay the same and they're gonna help us learn. It's important to understand that every single one of us has a different neutral face, right? The key is watching for change when the emotion passes over someone's face. So you want to get to know the faces of the people closest to you, become an expert on them. And then you're gonna know if your partner is actually angry or if they just have resting bitch face, right? And just to be clear, resting bitch face is not a gendered expression. Anybody can have the RBF, right? So we don't want to just look at somebody and assume that they're angry or sad or upset if that's actually just their face. They probably have to go through life saying, it's just my face all the time, right? So if they are your people, get to know that. Make sure that you know what they look like in their neutral state so that you can see the change. Okay, let's look at another one here. So, which one of these is not sadness? B. B is absolutely not sadness. Any ideas of what it is? Fear? Yeah, fear is a great one. I picked a couple of the easiest bits out of the quiz for us so that we would have really great chances of success today. So I do encourage you to go online and check out the rest. Some of them are actually quite challenging, but you're right. That one is not sadness, that one is fear. So, in order to communicate effectively, we need to mirror or match the emotion that's being shown. But it's not necessary to actually feel exactly what the other person is feeling. You can sit with someone in sadness without losing yourself in despair, or you can validate someone's anger without getting furious. This can take a lot of practice. Um, therapists and counselors actually spend quite a lot of time practicing how not to take on the emotions of their clients. And this is what I do while at work is that there's some distance. Even though I care about the students that come into my office, they're not my people, right? So I can actually be a little bit more objective, and I'm not trying to carry their emotion. I can enter into it without it consuming me much harder with the people. That are closest to us, right? Okay, so we've got one more, well, a couple more faces. So our next batch here, which one of these is not happy? Hey. Yep. And what is that one? What do you think that one is? You got it. It is contempt. And why do why do we think that one's contempt? What are we seeing? Yeah, the asymmetric. You guys are like, you are a quick study. So yes, that asymmetric smirk, contempt, right? So that one is not happy. So this isn't just about negative emotions. This isn't just about us noticing when someone's ticked off at us or you know when they're afraid. This also can be about happy emotions. It is just as important to recognize happiness or enjoyment and celebrate with our people as it is to see that they're afraid and offer them comfort, right? If your son or daughter came into the house one evening, uh having just been at the gas station and came up and was like, you are not gonna believe this. Gas was 98 cents a liter. And you went, oh, that's nice. How would that feel? Like if you were excited, even about something kind of, I was gonna say trivial, but gas prices aren't exactly trivial. They're they're they're gonna have a good portion of our budgets, aren't they? But if you were like excited about something, even something little, and you got like a mm, whatever, or oh, that's nice. When we think back to that bidding, would that feel like turning away from a bid or turning against a bid, or would that feel like turning toward a bid? Right? When our people are happy, we want to celebrate with them. If we are not feeling happy in the moment, we need to like conjure up some happy so that we can celebrate with them. Let their happy like be shared with you, right? Bring it in with bring it in to that emotion so that you can join them there. Okay, we've got our last one here. Last one. Okay, so I want you to tell me what emotion is this? I'm glad you're silent. It's quite funny. We've got a text conversation on the screen, right? Now, I and I I actually I picked this one for a couple reasons because it is quite funny. Um, but so we've got somebody's mother, we're assuming probably an older mom, saying, Please stop changing the Google logo so much. I like the original one. And the the the child says, Mom, I don't change the logo, Google changes it. Now, could they be going, Mom, I don't change the Google logo, Google changes it. Or could they be going, Oh, mom, I don't change the Google logo. Google changes it. Two really different responses. Which one do you which one do you think that is? Do we have any way to know? We don't, right? If you cannot see someone's face or their body or hear their tone of voice, you cannot tell what emotion they are communicating with. We love to think that we can, right? We read emotion into text messages and emails all the time. And even with emojis. And I had someone say, Well, I put lots of emojis in because you know, then people will know. And I'm like, Yes, you are absolutely helping. You're giving cues, right? But people interpret emojis differently. There's some that I use that I'm told only old people use it that way. So it happens, right? Apparently, apparently the thumbs up is passive aggressive. Who knew, right? Not me. I'm old enough that that means like, yes, A-OK, we're good, right? You cannot guarantee how that is going to come across. So you're you, you know, you're absolutely helping, you're giving some cues, but it's not, it is not a surefire thing, right? I also am a very sarcastic person, and I just desperately wish there was something like sarcastic quotes or brackets, like sarcastices instead of parentheses, you know. I'm like, I really, really would love that in my written communication. That would make my life so much better. But we don't have it. So be careful not to assume what's going on. As you get better and better about at this skill, you're gonna be knocking it out of the park, just like we did with those practice ones. But there is something that you need to be really clear about. There is no amount of expertise in this world in recognizing emotions on a person's face that will tell you why they feel that way. We like to believe that we know why others are having the emotional response that they are. But being able to read people does not mean that you can read their minds. I'm gonna say it again. Just because you have figured out the emotion does not mean you know its source. You have to ask. Even if you're a little unsure about what the emotion is, it could be something as simple as, hey, that didn't seem to land the way that I thought it was going to. What's going on with you right now? Right? You don't have to even assume an emotion, but you cannot know why somebody is feeling that way. That is another thing that we as humans love to do. Oh, they're feeling like this. Oh, they think this about me. Most of the time we're wrong. We actually don't get that right very often at all. So when we combine the skill of noticing and responding to emotion with what we learned last week about the bids that people make, we're well on our way to detoxifying our relationships and becoming more skillful communicators. We're gonna keep building in these this series and give you more and more little tidbits and ways to get better at this. But right now, I'm just gonna suggest that you focus on your core relationships. Who are the people that you really want to get this right with? That's who you want to focus on. When things went really badly in my interaction with my daughter, one of the mistakes I made was not looking at her. We were shoulder to shoulder, I was looking at the sewing machine, trying to figure out what was going on with it, and I missed the opportunity to turn toward her bid because I missed seeing her in that moment. Thankfully, we were able to work through this misunderstanding. We were able to do some repair. We got into a position where we were facing each other. I made sure to take some time to notice the impact that my words were having on her. And I did my best to make sure that I didn't leave her feeling invisible at the end of the conversation. Do I wish that it wouldn't have happened? Of course. Would it have been better if it hadn't happened? Of course. But repair is possible, right? We can move forward from that because it's going to take practice to get this right. We want to use the skills that we learn today, notice the emotions that people are displaying, and use that information to turn toward their bids for connection. I encourage you to spend some time practicing. Check out the quizzes online. Some of them are quite funny. There's another quiz that I won't even tell you my results, but it's called Are You a Liar? That one was a fun one. So there's a whole bunch of other quizzes that you can find online that just like get look at this like gamut of facial expressions. Check it out, see what's out there. You want to practice what we've learned so far. It does take some practice. With the goal of skillful communication, we want to be acting in ways that build an improved relationships. Your future self and the people that you walk into the future with will thank you if you do. All right. So I'm gonna leave you with that quiz to go home with. If you're listening to the podcast or you're online, we're gonna have that available in the show notes, um, in the YouTube comments under the video, so you can find that. But if you want to check it out, again, paul ekman.com/slash quizzes. And just remember the importance and the value of seeing the people in front of you. Thanks for coming today. Appreciate it.