What is your skin saying about your emotions right now?
People are surprisingly accurate at reading emotions from the colour of the face alone — even when the expression doesn’t change, research finds.
Based on subtle changes in the skin colour around the nose, cheeks and chin, we can identify happiness, sadness, surprise and many other emotions.
Happiness, for example, involves red cheeks and temples.
However, the same face, but with a redder forehead, signals surprise.
Disgust creates a blue-yellow cast around the lips and red-green appears at the forehead and nose.
People are able to read these signals automatically, without learning them.
The conclusion comes from a study which draws a novel link between the central nervous system and facial expressions.
The colours on the face are such good predictors that the researchers were able to construct a computer program that could identify human emotions with 90% accuracy, just from facial colours.
Professor Aleix Martinez, who led the study, said:
“We identified patterns of facial coloring that are unique to every emotion we studied.
We believe these color patterns are due to subtle changes in blood flow or blood composition triggered by the central nervous system.
Not only do we perceive these changes in facial color, but we use them to correctly identify how other people are feeling, whether we do it consciously or not.”
For the study people were shown pictures of faces with a neutral expression, but with the colours for different emotions superimposed over the top.
When asked to guess how the person was feeling, people were right up to 75% of the time, depending on the emotion.
They got the emotion right, despite the only clue being changes in the colour of the face.
Man or woman, whatever ethnicity, everyone displayed the same pattern for the same emotion, the researchers found.
Professor Martinez said:
“People have always said that we use makeup to look beautiful or younger, but I think that it is possible that we actually do it to appear happier or create a positive perception of emotion—or a negative perception, if you wanted to do that.”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Benitez-Quiroz et al., 2018).
