Sylviane---Week 4 Post: Emotional Expression

Sylviane Boddy

The Gladwell reading concerning reading faces brought up a number of points that I found particularly interesting. In its account of John Yarbrough’s encounter with the criminal, Yarbrough is described as having a “hunch” that the kid with the gun was not a threat, and that this understanding was something that “ninety-nine out people out of hundred wouldn’t have seen.” It proceeds to detail a study in which participants are shown videos of people telling the truth or lying, and that Yarbrough performed far better than the average fifty percent correct score. This made me wonder what would cause any one individual to be so skilled at a task of reading faces, considering that is something we all encounter every day. (Granted, Yarbrough was a police office and likely had a bit more experience in immediately threatening situations, like the one described.) Further, because it has been shown in a variety of studies that emotional expressions are essentially universal across cultures, can it be suggested that reading faces is a genetically encoded skill? It is known that face processing activates specific areas of the brain, namely the fusiform gyrus, occipital gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus, but what specifically gives us the knowledge to complete such tasks; is it a skill we have learned throughout our lives or something we are born with? Finally, I wondered about the impact of other factors, such as body position and gestures, on reading a person’s emotion or state of mind in their face. Previous reading mentioned that little is known about the biological nature of reading this information, but their importance in reading emotion cannot be disregarded.