Former FBI Agent Explains How to Read Facial Expressions | WIRED

from the time we're born we spend an inordinate amount of time studying each other's faces as babies we can recognize that big smile that we see of that caring mother looking down on us and so forth but we're confronted with many variants of that just take a look at these all examples of smiles some come to us they're very genuine some are a little reserved some are a little nervous they're all smiles but what are they communicating my name is joe navarro and for 25 years i was a spy catcher for the fbi you may

be familiar with my previous video i talked about body language there's just no pinocchio effect and people who prattle that and say well we can detect deception because the person touches their nose or covers their mouths that's just sheer nonsense and today we're going to focus on the face when it comes to non-verbals the face is key there's so much information and feelings that we receive from the face that for us the face takes primacy so one of the ways to to look at the the face is to think of it in two areas comfort

and discomfort because really that's how the brain reacts to the world so let's start with psychological comfort when we're very comfortable the muscles of the face become very relaxed and we have all the behaviors that are associated with it smiling laughing usually the pupils are slightly wider the lips are full and usually the chin tends to be further out the very second that there's psychological discomfort usually it begins to register in several areas now for some people will see it in the forehead and here between the eyes where they'll be furrowing of the forehead or

squinting and of course the tucking down of the chin or in some instances where something is really emotional you'll see the chin begins to vibrate covering of the eyes also is a display of psychological discomfort so our faces what we feel in that moment is immediately displayed by our nonverbals and the easiest way to look at it is is that behavior consistent with comfort or is it consistent with discomfort one of the questions that i'm often asked is how do we read each other how do we read each other's faces we start with the hair

how it's combed what color it is is it dry is it wet is it curly is it this arranged as children we play with each other's hair we look at each other's hair we immediately notice when it's wet or dry or it's changed in some form we look at the forehead for information when it's smooth the forehead tells us that everything is well and placid when it's furrowed we begin to notice that perhaps there's some sort of discomfort the eyebrows you know the arching of the eyebrows is our exclamation point doing that eyebrow flash when

we see someone we recognize and we go hey how are you the glabella this little area between the eyes someone says something we don't like and we might squint at them and look at them as scans the nose do we wrinkle our nose upward we do that bunny nose at about three months of age babies are already doing this when they don't like something they're being offered and then there's the lips which convey so much information maybe as often as the eyes i'm asked about smiles we have the social smile the interested smile a curious

smile we have little secretive smiles that we might give to someone that we're interested in there is so much to our mouths it's it's so expressive but starting at a very young age we're already focusing on these things you may not notice for instance the pupils whether they're wide or narrowed but subconsciously your brain is assessing this information there's just so much there so we never stop communicating with our faces it is something that is always telegraphing our emotions and our sentiments and sometimes even our desires one of the things that was startling to me

when studying faces was what i had been picking up for decades when i look back on the lone ranger watching the movies of zorro or even batman and robin one of the things you notice is all these good guys were wearing masks that covered the eyes but the bad guys always covered their mouths so the bank robbers would wear a bandana and then just pull it over their faces undoubtedly we are being affected by the fact that we cannot see the full face i mean we first had reporting of this right after world war one

where we saw the horrors of that war and soldiers who had their faces somehow ameliorated they had to wear these masks and even with mass they still were not being received well into society and so there has always been something unsettling about not being able to see the full face and i think it has to do with the fact that we get so much information from there but even with mass we can still communicate with each other we can still understand what people are trying to say and you can pick up above the line of

the mask look at this clip notice that even though they're wearing a mask we can still see the emotions behind that mask we can still decode that face now obviously you're not going to see lip compression but with some people you really see it both in the forehead and in the glabella region of the eyes and then of course in the orbits of the eyes there's a lot of squinting so for some people it doesn't matter that you can't see their mouth you'll certainly see it in their face but you know the rest of the

body is transmitting information if we can't see the full face where can we go the neck the shoulders right the hands the fingers the thumbs in particular right so when we emphasize the fingers are wide when we lack emphasis our fingers come together even our feet communicate sentiments so we have to redirect where we're getting information but always remember that from the time we're born we're looking at the face for that information we just have to be patient with ourselves and know that there's still information out there we may just have to get it from

other parts of the body a lot of us now are doing these uh video conferences zoom google meets and and so forth and the visual range has changed completely because now we're only seeing maybe from the chest up maybe we're only seeing the face one of the things we know is that in face-to-face meetings this tends to be on a subconscious level very aggressive so directly looking at another person as i am now directly looking at the lens is actually creating discomfort that we actually get greater comfort when we turn slightly it makes the other

person relaxed and one of the mistakes that i'm finding on zoom calls and google meets and other environments is this very direct intense look at the lens so one of the things that you can try next time you're on a video call is angle yourself and see if you find that more comfortable see if it's more relaxed see if in doing that behavior that the other person then does the same thing they feel a little bit more relaxed maybe they lean back a little bit more one of the things that i teach is that synchrony

is harmony so the more that i can get the other party to relax to mirror my behaviors the more i know that we are in synchrony and that's powerful because we are both engaging each other at a conscious and at a subconscious level so about 30 years ago while still working for the fbi and conducting thousands of interviews i began to notice that there were times when i would look at a face and there was just something odd about it i couldn't quite pinpoint what i was seeing and so i began to think about the

concept of chirality and chirality usually in in chemistry means that when you fold something over it looks like it's going to fold over perfectly but in fact it doesn't and that's what i found with faces sometimes when someone presents in a way that they're difficult to interpret it's because their faces are actually showing two emotions one on the left and one in the right and if you divide the face in half and just cover one half of the face you'll be able to more clearly see what that specific emotion is take a look at these

photographs now these photographs are taken during emotionally charged moments and when you first see the face you may look at it and say well there's something going on there but it's not till you cover perfectly one half and then cover the other half that you begin to see the real gross differences normally when we feel an emotion we see it fully on both sides of the face but because we don't see the full emotion on the whole face that's something that we need to focus on and determine why because something isn't right why do we

focus so much on the face we focus on the face because of necessity because through our faces we can show that we care through our faces we can validate what others are going through and so by studying the faces of others we gain understanding about ourselves realizing that our body language will affect others positively and that's why we study non-verbals we study non-verbals because it benefits us but it also benefits others