The Face Of Emotion

William Shakespeare famously wrote that "a face is like a book," and common wisdom has it that our faces reveal our deep-seated emotions. But what if the reverse were also true? What if our facial expressions set our moods instead of revealing them? What if there were actual science to support the exhortation, "smile, be happy?" Dermatologic surgeon Eric Finzi has been studying that question for nearly two decades, and in this ground breaking book he marshals evidence suggesting that our facial expressions are not secondary to, but rather a central driving force of, our emotions. Based on clinical experience and original research, Dr. Finzi shows how changing a person's face not only affects their relationships with others but also with themselves. In his studies using Botox, he has shown how inhibiting the frown of clinically depressed patients leads many to experience relief. This work is a dramatic departure from the neuroscience-based thinking on emotions that tends to view emotions solely as the result of neurotransmitters in the brain. Part absorbing medical narrative, part think piece on the nature of emotion, this is a bold call for us to rethink the causes of unhappiness.

Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings reviews research findings about the link between the face and emotion and provides some guidelines for study of this complicated but intriguing phenomenon. Some of the conceptual ambiguities that have hindered research and the methodological decisions that must be made in planning research on the face and emotion are discussed. How past investigators handled these matters is presented critically, and a set of standards is offered. This book is comprised of 21 chapters and begins with an overview of questions about how the face provides information about emotion, with emphasis on evidence based on scientific research (largely in psychology). The reader is then introduced to conceptual ambiguities and methodological decisions related to research on the face-emotion connection (including sampling), along with some important research findings. In particular, emotion categories and dimensions that observers can judge on the basis of facial behavior are analyzed, and whether such judgments can be accurate. The similarities and differences in facial behavior across cultures are also considered, along with the relative contribution of facial behavior and contextual information to the judgment of emotion. This monograph is intended primarily for students of psychology, anthropology, ethology, sociology, and biology, as well as those planning or already conducting research on the face.

Filled with breakthrough research, the book explains how to identify the facial expression of basic emotions and how to tell when people try to mask, simulate or neutralize their expression. Features practical exercises to help build skills.

The original edition of Emotion in the Human Face, published in 1972, was the first volume to evaluate and integrate all the research on facial expression of emotion since Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals was published in 1872. It presented a detailed, critical discussion of research involving the face and emotion, focusing on the complex conceptual and methodological issues involved, and settling many past controversies, such as whether the face provides accurate information about emotion, and whether some facial expressions are universal. This special Malor Books edition includes a new Preface, three additional chapters, and a new conclusion summarizing Ekman's final views on the field that he has played such a large part in creating. Contributors to this work include: Paul Ekman, Phoebe Ellsworth, Wallace V. Friesen, Joseph C. Hager, Harriet Oster, Maureen O'Sullivan, William K. Redican and Silvan S. Tomkins.

This baby is happy. Can you make a happy face? Find the happy baby! This bold, beautiful board book features six essential facial expressions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, silly, and sleepy. The idea is simple: Show a large, establishing image of a baby’s face, then children making the same face, then ask the reader to find that baby among several other faces. The very last spread includes all of the baby faces and a mirror so babies can watch themselves make every face imaginable.

It reviews current research and provides guidelines for future exploration of facial expression.

This book discusses human emotion recognition from face images using different modalities, highlighting key topics in facial expression recognition, such as the grid formation, distance signature, shape signature, texture signature, feature selection, classifier design, and the combination of signatures to improve emotion recognition. The book explains how six basic human emotions can be recognized in various face images of the same person, as well as those available from benchmark face image databases like CK+, JAFFE, MMI, and MUG. The authors present the concept of signatures for different characteristics such as distance and shape texture, and describe the use of associated stability indices as features, supplementing the feature set with statistical parameters such as range, skewedness, kurtosis, and entropy. In addition, they demonstrate that experiments with such feature choices offer impressive results, and that performance can be further improved by combining the signatures rather than using them individually. There is an increasing demand for emotion recognition in diverse fields, including psychotherapy, biomedicine, and security in government, public and private agencies. This book offers a valuable resource for researchers working in these areas.