It doesn’t matter whether you speak English, Mandarin Chinese, or use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate: all humans have a single, universal facial expression which embodies all negative emotions, researchers from Ohio State University have discovered.
The expression, which they are calling “the not face,” consists of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and a raised chin– it is made by people of all creeds and cultures when they are attempting to convey negative sentiments such as their disagreement with a statement, cognitive scientist and OSU professor Aleix Martinez and his colleagues explain in their new study.
Their research, which was published in the journal Cognition, found that all men and women, no matter which language they s, have facial muscles which contract to instinctively form “the not face” at the same frequency used to speak or sign words in a sentence, and that some ASL users make the face instead of signing the word “not.”
“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language,” the OSU professor said in a statement. The findings “strongly suggest a link between language and facial expressions of emotion,” he added, and may help explain language’s origins.
Video analysis reveals how our faces become grammatical markers
Martinez and his colleagues previously identified 21 distinct emotional expressions using computer algorithms. Those expressions included complex combinations of different feelings, such as “happily disgusted,” a combination of the basic emotions “happy” and “disgusted” that we could make when watching a gross-out comedy, they explained.
As part of their new study, they determined that if “the not face” truly existed, it would likely be a combination of three expressions most frequently used to indicate disagreement on a moral level: anger, disgust, and contempt. To test the hypothesis, they recruited 158 students and filmed them as they had a casual conversation with the person operating the recording equipment.
The students belonged to four groups and each conversation took place in their native languages: English (a Germanic language), Spanish (a Latin-based one), Mandarin Chinese, and ASL. These student were selected to represent a variety of different grammatical structures, Martinez and his colleagues said. The goal was to find an expression that acted as a marker for negation – a facial version of the word “not,” essentially – that would be similar across all groups.
Each study participant was either asked to memorize and recite negative sentences, or asked a series of questions designed to illicit a negative response or disagreement. The authors identified clear markers of negation across all groups when the students gave answers that, when translated, meant that something was a bad idea and should not be implemented. By reviewing videos frame by frame, they were able to determine which facial muscles were moving and in which directions to pinpoint exactly how the human face produces an expression of general disagreement.
Breaking down ‘the not face’ and how we use it
So what does “the not face” look like? According to the researchers, it combines the furrowed brows found in expressions of anger with the raised chin that is indicative of disgust and lips that are pressed together to convey contempt towards what is being said. All three muscle movements were found in each of the students, regardless of what language they spoke or if they signed.
Additional analysis revealed that different groups conveyed the expression at different tempos, with native English speakers making the face at a frequency of 4.33 Hz, Spanish at 5.23 Hz and Mandarin speakers at 7.49 Hz, all of which fall within the normal 3 Hz to 8 Hz range of human language. ASL speakers, likewise, made “the not face” at a frequency of 5.48 Hz. The findings suggest that the expression is an actual grammatical marker for negation, the authors said.
The study also found that ASL students used the facial expression in different ways. Sometimes they would actually sign the word not and sometimes they would just shake their head “no,” each of which is an accepted way to communicate negation in sign language. However, at times they did neither, using “the not face” as the only method to communicate negative emotions, which is something that researchers had never seen before.
“This facial expression not only exists, but in some instances, it is the only marker of negation in a signed sentence,” Martinez said. “Sometimes the only way you can tell that the meaning of the sentence is negative is that person made the ‘not face’ when they signed it.”
—–
Image credit: Ohio State University
Comments