A team of scientists, led by Ohio State University cognitive researcher Prof. Aleix Martinez, has identified a universal facial expression that is interpreted across many cultures as the embodiment of negative emotion.
‘Not’ faces. Image credit: Ohio State University.
“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language,” said Prof. Martinez, who is the senior author on a study published in the May 2016 issue of the journal Cognition.
Proved identical for native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language, the look consists of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and raised chin, and because we make it when we convey negative sentiments, such as ‘I do not agree,” researchers are calling it the ‘not face.’
Previously, Prof. Martinez and co-authors had used computer algorithms to identify 21 distinct emotional expressions — including complex ones that are combinations of more basic emotions.
For their new study, they hypothesized that if a universal ‘not face’ existed, it was likely to be combination of three basic facial expressions that are universally accepted to indicate moral disagreement: anger, disgust and contempt.
“Why focus on negative expressions? Charles Darwin believed that the ability to communicate danger or aggression was key to human survival long before we developed the ability to talk,” Prof. Martinez said.
“So we suspected that if any truly universal facial expressions of emotion exist, then the expression for disapproval or disagreement would be the easiest to identify.”
To test their hypothesis, Prof. Martinez and his colleagues sat 158 students in front of a digital camera.
The participants were filmed and photographed as they had a casual conversation with the person behind the camera in their native language.
The scientists were looking for a facial ‘grammatical marker,’ a facial expression that determines the grammatical function of a sentence.
For example, in the sentence ‘I am not going to the party,’ there is a grammatical marker of negation: ‘not.’ Without it, the meaning of the sentence completely changes: ‘I am going to the party.’
If the grammatical marker of negation is universal, the team reasoned, then all the participants would make similar facial expressions when using that grammatical marker, regardless of which language they were speaking or signing. They should all make the same ‘not face’ in conjunction with – or in lieu of – the spoken or signed marker of negation.
In the tests, the participants either memorized and recited negative sentences that the scientists had written for them ahead of time, or the students were prompted with questions that were likely to illicit disagreement, such as ‘A study shows that tuition should increase 30 percent. What do you think?’
In all four groups – speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin and American Sign Language, the team identified clear grammatical markers of negation.
The participants’ answers translated to statements like ‘That’s not a good idea,’ and ‘They should not do that.’
The team manually tagged images of the students speaking, frame by frame, to show which facial muscles were moving and in which directions.
Then computer algorithms searched the thousands of resulting frames to find commonalities among them.
A ‘not face’ emerged: the furrowed brows of ‘anger” combined with the raised chin of ‘disgust’ and the pressed-together lips of ‘contempt.’
Regardless of language – and regardless of whether they were speaking or signing – the participants’ faces displayed these same three muscle movements when they communicated negative sentences.
The study also reveals that our facial muscles contract to form the ‘not face’ at the same frequency at which we speak or sign words in a sentence.
That is, we all instinctively make the ‘not face’ as if it were part of our spoken or signed language.
What’s more, Prof. Martinez and co-authors discovered that speakers of American Sign Language sometimes make the ‘not face’ instead of signing the word ‘not’ – a use of facial expression in American Sign Language that was previously undocumented.
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C. Fabian Benitez-Quiroz et al. 2016. The not face: A grammaticalization of facial expressions of emotion. Cognition, vol. 150, no. 5, pp. 77-84; doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.02.004
