facial expressions

Over lunch at Menotti's yesterday, Colin and I talked about body language and he told me how to differentiate a real from a put on smile. This led us to read up on stuff concerning facial expressions which is amazing, cos apparently so much information can be picked up from the face, only most of the time we miss this crucial info. And when we do, the visual clues flash by so quickly that we don't even consciously register them, and hence dismiss our interpretation of what are termed "microexpressions" as mere hunches. We tend not to lend too much weight to hunches because we aren't entirely sure what these are based on-which could be a big mistake as far as communication goes.

About the real and fake smile thing, here's the explanation from http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm

"Perhaps the most famous involuntary expression is what Ekman has dubbed the Duchenne smile, in honor of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, who first attempted to document the workings of the muscles of the face with the camera. If I ask you to smile, you' ll flex your zygomatic major. By contrast, if you smile spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you' ll not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye. It is almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis, on demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at something genuinely pleasurable. This kind of smile "does not obey the will," Duchenne wrote. "Its absence unmasks the false friend."