Transcription
From the time we're born, we spend an inordinate amount of time studying each other's faces. As babies, we can recognize that big smile of the caring mother looking down on us and so forth. But we're confronted with many variants of that. Just take a look at these examples of smiles. Some come to us very genuine, some are a little reserved, some are a little nervous. They're all smiles, but what are they communicating?
My name is Joe Navarro, and for 25 years, I was a spy catcher for the FBI. You may be familiar with my previous video where I talked about body language. There's just no Pinocchio effect, and people who prattle that and say, "Well, we can detect deception because the person touches their nose or covers their mouths," that's just sheer nonsense.
Today, we're going to focus on the face. When it comes to non-verbals, the face is key. There's so much information and feelings that we receive from the face that for us, the face takes primacy. One of the ways to look at the face is to think of it in two areas: comfort and discomfort. Because really, that's how the brain reacts to the world.
So let's start with psychological comfort. When we're very comfortable, the muscles of the face become very relaxed, and we have all the behaviors associated with it: smiling, laughing. Usually, the pupils are slightly wider, the lips are full, and the chin tends to be further out. The very second there's psychological discomfort, it usually begins to register in several areas.
For some people, we'll see it in the forehead and here between the eyes, where there'll be furrowing of the forehead or squinting. Of course, there's the tucking down of the chin, or in some instances where something is really emotional, you'll see the chin begin to vibrate. Covering of the eyes is also a display of psychological discomfort.
So our faces, what we feel in that moment, is immediately displayed by our nonverbals. The easiest way to look at it is: is that behavior consistent with comfort, or is it consistent with discomfort? One of the questions that I'm often asked is, how do we read each other? How do we read each other's faces?
We start with the hair: how it's combed, what color it is, is it dry, is it wet, is it curly, is it disarranged? As children, we play with each other's hair; we look at each other's hair. We immediately notice when it's wet or dry or has changed in some form.
We look at the forehead for information. When it's smooth, the forehead tells us that everything is well and placid. When it's furrowed, we begin to notice that perhaps there's some sort of discomfort. The eyebrows, you know, the arching of the eyebrows is our exclamation point. Doing that eyebrow flash when we see someone we recognize and we go, "Hey, how are you?"
The glabella, this little area between the eyes, someone says something we don't like, and we might squint at them. As for the nose, do we wrinkle our nose upward? We do that bunny nose at about three months of age; babies are already doing this when they don't like something they're being offered.
Then there are the lips, which convey so much information, maybe as often as the eyes. I'm asked about smiles: we have the social smile, the interested smile, a curious smile. We have little secretive smiles that we might give to someone that we're interested in. There is so much to our mouths; it's so expressive.
But starting at a very young age, we're already focusing on these things. You may not notice, for instance, the pupils, whether they're wide or narrowed, but subconsciously, your brain is assessing this information. There's just so much there.
So we never stop communicating with our faces. It is something that is always telegraphing our emotions and our sentiments, and sometimes even our desires. One of the things that was startling to me when studying faces was what I had been picking up for decades.
When I look back on the Lone Ranger, watching the movies of Zorro, or even Batman and Robin, one of the things you notice is all these good guys were wearing masks that covered the eyes, but the bad guys always covered their mouths. The bank robbers would wear a bandana and then just pull it over their faces. Undoubtedly, we are being affected by the fact that we cannot see the full face.
I mean, we first had reporting of this right after World War One, where we saw the horrors of that war and soldiers who had their faces somehow ameliorated. They had to wear these masks, and even with masks, they still were not being received well into society.
There has always been something unsettling about not being able to see the full face, and I think it has to do with the fact that we get so much information from there. But even with masks, we can still communicate with each other. We can still understand what people are trying to say, and you can pick up above the line of the mask.
Look at this clip. Notice that even though they're wearing a mask, we can still see the emotions behind that mask. We can still decode that face. Now, obviously, you're not going to see lip compression, but with some people, you really see it both in the forehead and in the glabella region of the eyes.
Then, of course, in the orbits of the eyes, there's a lot of squinting. So for some people, it doesn't matter that you can't see their mouth; you'll certainly see it in their face. But you know the rest of the body is transmitting information. If we can't see the full face, where can we go? The neck, the shoulders, right? The hands, the fingers, the thumbs in particular, right?
So when we emphasize, the fingers are wide; when we lack emphasis, our fingers come together. Even our feet communicate sentiments. So we have to redirect where we're getting information. But always remember that from the time we're born, we're looking at the face for that information.
We just have to be patient with ourselves and know that there's still information out there. We may just have to get it from other parts of the body. A lot of us now are doing these video conferences: Zoom, Google Meets, and so forth. The visual range has changed completely because now we're only seeing maybe from the chest up; maybe we're only seeing the face.
One of the things we know is that in face-to-face meetings, this tends to be, on a subconscious level, very aggressive. So directly looking at another person, as I am now directly looking at the lens, is actually creating discomfort. We actually get greater comfort when we turn slightly; it makes the other person relaxed.
One of the mistakes that I'm finding on Zoom calls, Google Meets, and other environments is this very direct, intense look at the lens. So one of the things that you can try next time you're on a video call is angle yourself and see if you find that more comfortable. See if it's more relaxed.
See if, in doing that behavior, the other person then does the same thing; they feel a little bit more relaxed. Maybe they lean back a little bit more. One of the things that I teach is that synchrony is harmony. So the more that I can get the other party to relax, to mirror my behaviors, the more I know that we are in synchrony.
That's powerful because we are both engaging each other at a conscious and at a subconscious level. So about 30 years ago, while still working for the FBI and conducting thousands of interviews, I began to notice that there were times when I would look at a face, and there was just something odd about it. I couldn't quite pinpoint what I was seeing.
So I began to think about the concept of chirality. Chirality, usually in chemistry, means that when you fold something over, it looks like it's going to fold over perfectly, but in fact, it doesn't. That's what I found with faces. Sometimes when someone presents in a way that they're difficult to interpret, it's because their faces are actually showing two emotions: one on the left and one on the right.
If you divide the face in half and just cover one half of the face, you'll be able to more clearly see what that specific emotion is. Take a look at these photographs. Now, these photographs are taken during emotionally charged moments. When you first see the face, you may look at it and say, "Well, there's something going on there," but it's not until you cover perfectly one half and then cover the other half that you begin to see the real gross differences.
Normally, when we feel an emotion, we see it fully on both sides of the face. But because we don't see the full emotion on the whole face, that's something that we need to focus on and determine why, because something isn't right.
Why do we focus so much on the face? We focus on the face because of necessity. Through our faces, we can show that we care. Through our faces, we can validate what others are going through.
By studying the faces of others, we gain understanding about ourselves, realizing that our body language will affect others positively. That's why we study non-verbals. We study non-verbals because it benefits us, but it also benefits others.