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Monday, February 14, 2005
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Blink, avatars, and the weird world of transformed social interaction. The last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink
explores how we decode the language of facial expression. The syntax of
that language boils down to a set of "action units" -- a facial action coding system
that was first described in 1978 by Wallace Friesen and Paul Ekman.
Some aspects of our facial language are under conscious control,
Gladwell learns from Ekman, but others aren't:
If I were to ask you
to smile, you would flex your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you were
to smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you would
not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi,
pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye. It is
almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis on
demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we
smile at something genuinely pleasurable. This kind of smile "does not
obey the will," Duchenne wrote. "Its absence unmasks the false friend." [Blink]
Reading this facial language is an unevenly-distributed skill. People
who do it well seem to (and arguably can) read minds. People who it
badly are socially handicapped -- perhaps even in a clinical way. But
everyone can learn to do it better. For example, I have a psychologist
friend, Larry Welkowitz,
who uses canned videos to help his patients with Asperger's syndrome
learn to recognize microexpressions. And that just scratches the
surface of what's possible. It's fascinating, and more than a little
spooky, to think about what might happen once we can easily record,
transmit, and even transform the protocol that our faces are speaking. ... [Jon's Radio]
2:50:08 PM 
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© Copyright
2005
Judy Smith.
Last update:
4/22/2005; 5:17:16 PM.
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