Facial expressions in business

Jodie Humphries

You can read a lot from someones facial expressions, you can tell whether someone is happy or sad, calm or angry and even whether someone is being genuine or not. Without speaking a word, a facial expression can convey a great deal of information to others.

A facial expression results from one or more motions or positions of the muscles of the face. These movements convey the emotional nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans, but also occur in most other mammals and some other animal species.

In the business world, much emphasis is placed on your first words, but it isn't all about what you say. You only have seconds to make a first impression that can make or break a relationship in business. Since the face is the first thing we notice about a person, it's vital to use your face to make that crucial connection.

Our face expresses more than we can imagine. Reading facial expressions therefore can reveal more about the person than you can ever imagine.

Researchers have shown that 55 percent of non-verbal communication is facial. People generally try to mask negative expressions such as disappointment, fear or envy, but these feelings are often reflected in their eyes, or the downward turn of the mouth.

Genuine expressions of anger and surprise can be quite brief, lasting for only a few seconds. If an expression remains for longer, it may be a sign of insincerity. In general, a genuine expression matches the beginnings of a feeling, so watch for expressions that come after the words that express an emotion, the article 'Reading body language - what your customer's facial expressions say in body language' states.

Reading facial expressions

Research conducted last year by a team from Glasgow University, suggested that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently. Not only can that mean confusion in every day life, but it can lead to confusion when conducting business.

The study found that East Asian participating in the research focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face. While East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions.

The work, which was published in Current Biology journal challenged the idea facial expressions are universally understood.

In the study, East Asians were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and "disgust" as "anger".

The researchers said the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.

They found that East Asian participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth.

Co-author, Dr. Rachael Jack, from the University of Glasgow, said: "Interestingly, although the eye region is ambiguous, subjects tended to bias their judgements towards less socially-threatening emotions - surprise rather than fear, for example.

"This perhaps highlights cultural differences when it comes to the social acceptability of emotions."

To conduct the research, the team showed 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians a set of standardised images depicting the seven main facial expressions: happy, sad, neutral, angry, disgusted, fearful and surprised.

They used eye movement trackers to monitor where the participants were looking when interpreting the expressions.

A computer program given the same information from the eyes as the East Asian observers was similarly unable to distinguish between the emotions of disgust and anger, and fear and surprise.

The paper states that the Eastern participants used a culturally specific decoding strategy that was inadequate to reliably distinguish the universal facial expressions of fear and disgust.

It concluded that information from the eyes is often ambiguous and confusing in these expressions, with consequences for cross-cultural communication and globalisation.

Just remember, our faces reveal a lot of our thoughts and feelings before we're even aware of it.

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