Facial Expressions in our communication
Our facial expressions make up an essential part of our communication. Facial expressions are universal. When we are not face-to-face, we use emojis to convey the same facial expressions.
What are facial expressions?
It was probably easy to see if you were happy or not when you went to school today. Facial expressions show when people are happy, sad or angry.
Researchers have written a lot of articles on how people communicate using facial expressions. Most researchers agree that we have six basic facial expressions: happiness/joy, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.
Universal facial expressions
Over the last ten years, some researchers have started saying that we have many more than six basic facial expressions.
Smiling doesn’t necessarily mean that you are happy. A smile can spring from desire, love,admiration or interest. Variations in how you smile can also express embarrassment, amusement or being happily disgusted.
Intentions, not feelings
But why do you smile at the people around you? Is it because you feel like sharing your emotions?
What if you frown at your brother? Does it happen automatically because you are upset, or is it a sign of unhappiness? Could you be frowning because you feel disappointed?
Alan Fridlund, a researcher from the University of California, thinks that our facial expressions are mostly controlled by our intentions and not our feelings. This means that we can use our facial expressions to make ourselves understood but also to steer things in the direction we want.
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Real or fake?
This does not mean that our smiles are not real. When you score a goal in a soccer game or get a nice message from someone you have a crush on, you probably get a huge smile on your face because of the joy you feel.
When a good friend says something in class, we smile to show support, not because it is funny. And you will perhaps laugh at your teacher’s joke to be on their good side, not because it is funny, right?
Fridlund thinks that we learn to tell the difference between real and fake smiles over time.
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Interpreting feelings
Knowing if a facial expression is real or not is not that important. Sometimes we force ourselves to smile so that people around us will think we are happy. If the smile seems heartfelt and sincere, the effect on our surroundings is the same as if we were really expressing that feeling.
If expressions are misunderstood there can be serious consequences.
Imagine going to the movies with a friend to see your favorite film. You have been looking forward to seeing the movie and hope that your friend has too.
But he looks angry and sometimes he makes weird faces. You might think that he doesn’t like the movie and you are disappointed.
What you didn’t know is that your friend had a stomach ache, and the pain made him make faces.
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Emojis
We send a lot of messages by SMS or on social media when we are not face to face with others.
About 20 billion messages are sent every day, and emojis were created to make text messages easy to understand. When you are face to face with someone, your tone of voice and facial expression show if you are happy or angry. Words on a screen can be harder to understand. Emojis can show feelings when you write, or they can represent an idea or object.
The First Emojis
People have been drawing faces when they write for hundreds of years. In the 1980s, when computers and cellphones were new, people put signs together to make symbols for feelings; . : – ) meant happy and : – ( sad.
In 1999 a Japanese designer made 176 symbols for different things like food, weather, sports and so on. These were the first emojis. The symbols spread around the world and in 2010, emojis were included in Unicode (the global code for characters).
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Replacing facial expressions
Are there no problems when using emojis? How does it feel to get a message with emojis compared to one without?
One problem with emojis can be that they mean different things to different people. There are also different opinions on when to use emojis. Some always include emojis, but others feel that they should not be used too often.
Misunderstood emojis
Some emojis look different on different platforms. This can lead to misunderstandings if you don’t know which system the other person is using.
When and where?
We still use smiley faces a lot. But you should only use them in informal writing, not when you write a paper in school. There are no rules for using emojis in sentences, but you should think about how you use them.
One criteria in general writing is that it should look tidy. This means that after punctuation, you add a space and then the emoji.
World Emoji Day
Emojis are now also in games, ads and calendars. July 17th is World Emoji Day because that is the date shown on the calendar emoji.
Whether they show up in the real or the virtual world, it is clear that our facial expressions make up a big part of our communication.
We use picture books with our children so they can learn about facial expressions. We are drilled on this knowledge as we face different parts of life like age, culture, and digital development.
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Sources:
- Slik funker verden (2019)
Orage Forlag AS
- Forskning.no (19.08.2020): Ansiktsuttrykk viser hva vi ønsker, ikke hva vi føler, ifølge forskere
https://forskning.no/biologi-hjernen-menneskekroppen/ansiktsuttrykk-viser-hva-vi-onsker-ikke-hva-vi-foler-ifolge-forskere/1644839
- Forskning.no (19.08.2020): Derfor er vi så dårlige til å tolke ansiktsuttrykk
https://forskning.no/psykologi/derfor-er-vi-sa-darlige-til-a-tolke-ansiktsuttrykk/1276785
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Emojipedia.org
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