Reading Faces

Have you ever watched a video reel when a young child gets glasses or a special hearing mechanism and sees or hears her parent(s) clearly for the first time?

Aren’t their facial expressions amazing? Sometimes a child seems confused or even startled. Other times, it’s obvious she is experiencing pure joy!

As curious observers and fellow humans, we see and receive those gigantic facial expressions on those tiny little faces and are moved to pout or squeal in delight right alongside them.

I’ve been feeling under the weather for a few days with congestion and complete laryngitis, and my daughter has mentioned more than once that she has never seen my face be so animated.

It’s true. I’ve been working extra hard to make my eyes show my excitement or my mouth show my joy, and my daughter is needing to pay much closer attention than normal to receive what it is that I’m trying to express. We’ve had some hysterical moments (like me belly laughing soundlessly) and some frustrating ones (like her thinking I’m avoiding her questions when I try to answer and nothing comes out).

So, it was great timing to happen upon Rick Hansen’s Just One Thing newsletter called What do their faces Say to You? In it, Hansen explains the role and need for facial expressions in the evolution of human communication and how our faces communicate our fundamental emotions to others.

Our faces are, indeed, “extraordinary transmitters” of our feelings and our needs. But, they work most effectively in partnership with “extraordinary receivers” which are our "remarkable capacities to recognize, sense, and infer states of mind in others from subtle and fleeting facial expressions.”

When not forced to pay attention due to the laryngitis of a loved one or the utter cuteness of a baby, do we really do a great job receiving what the many faces we encounter each day are trying to tell us? Hansen suggests as a society we could do better at receiving. If we practice, we can benefit ourselves and each other with the deeper connections and better understanding that we are hard-wired to have as human beings.

Below is an exercise Hansen suggests for how to put our "extraordinary receivers” to work in complementing the "extraordinary transmitters" of others.

When we want to really see someone's face.....

• Don't stare or be invasive. Look with respect.

• Just take a few extra seconds to get past superficial features and take in more of the person. Let him or her come into focus as a unique individual, with specific qualities, such as weariness, good humor, firmness, residues of anger, kindness, perkiness, hopefulness, and looking for things to like in life, etc.

• In particular, look at and around the eyes and mouth, which are major regions of social signaling in our faces.

• Let yourself not know about the person – especially with people that are familiar to you. It's OK to note to yourself what you see – "stress" . . . "kindness" . . . "determination" – or to reflect a bit, but mainly be like a child looking at a human face for the first time, startled and delighted by its magnificence.

• Have a sense of receiving, of letting in, of registering the other person in a deeper way than usual. As it happens, let yourself be moved by the experience.

Who knows? You may feel compelled to offer a word of comfort or even laugh with delight.

Then you know the facial transmission was received.

In love and learning,

Molly