How Facial Modifications Can Affect the Perception of Your Mood
One of the strongest forms of subconscious wisdom we have is the ability to read people’s facial expressions and body language to guess what they are thinking. If you enjoy the show ‘Lie to Me’, you’ll have a more detailed understanding of what I mean. However, nobody needs to have studied facial micro-expressions and their relationship to psychology to be able to ‘read someone’s vibes’, or guess what somebody is thinking or feeling. Due to a phenomenon known as mirroring, the ‘vibes’ we give out to people are often what we get back. This is where aging can play unexpected tricks on people – and colour their interactions with others as assumptions are made about their mood that simply aren’t true. We look at why and how these assumptions occur, and how dermal fillers (eg Juvederm) and other anti-wrinkle (eg Botox) treatments can help.
What is facial mirroring?
Facial mirroring is one of the methods that humans use to get along with each other. When somebody is speaking to us, people have often been observed to mirror their facial expressions and body language, in an attempt to show understanding of what a person is saying. Sometimes this will have unintended consequences – as we will see.
To explain this in practical terms, though, next time you are having a conversation with someone you can test the universality of mirroring. When you are both involved and concentrating on the conversation, shift your leg to a different position, and see if your friend copies you. A minute later, shift your arms to a different position, and see if they do the same. Take a sip of your drink … etc. It doesn’t always occur, but it will surprisingly often.
How we calculate facial expressions
Humans understand facial expressions through processes that we have learned since our first days of playing with our mothers and fathers. As adults, these recognition processes have become heuristics – rules of thumb, or familiar sets of actions – that the brain uses to assess somebody’s emotions from their face.
We understand these rules so well that software has been created that can mimic the decoding of emotions. Computer scientist Nicu Sebe at the University of Amsterdam developed facial recognition software that can pinpoint emotions with around 85% accuracy – similar to our own capacity.
The feedback loop of facial expressions
You can see that both the heuristics we use to understand what someone is feeling, and the mirroring phenomenon, can create a sport of feedback loop in which if you look a certain way, the other person will mimic and mirror that emotion, which you will then perceive and relay back to them. This is why it takes such discipline to remain calm in the face of anger, and why seeing somebody crying often triggers the same response in us. It is also why people say that smiles and happiness are contagious!
Facial expressions affected by aging
Some common facial expressions that are affected by aging, and often lead to misinterpretation of emotions, include:
- Dropping of the eyelid that makes people seem tired
- Lowering of the inner corners of the eyebrows towards the nose makes people seem angry or disgusted
- Increase in the distance between the eyebrows and eyelids can make people seem surprised or fearful
- Drooping of the outer part of the eyebrow makes people seem sad
How injectable fillers can help
Injectable fillers (eg Judeverm), other dermal fillers and indeed any anti-wrinkle treatment (eg Botox) can go a long way towards making people seem less tired, less sad, and less angry. Obviously there is less risk of creating unintended facial expressions with dermal fillers than with surgery, which might over-correct eyelid dropping and create a surprised or scared look for example. Another of the benefits of using injectable fillers to correct wrinkling and drooping (and the associated untruthful expressions) is that they are not permanent – your basic face is not irreversibly changed. They are worth trying, to see if the people around you react to you and treat you differently!
Sources:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2006/0811-mona_lisa_smiling.htm
http://www.plasticsurgerypractice.com/news/2008-05-28_01.asp
