PRESENTER:
When you look at this piece by Geng Jianyi, how does it make you feel? Four large panels, presenting tightly cropped faces; faces that are smiling, laughing out towards us. But…is that all?
WINTON AU:
So, you see there’s some contraction, around the eyebrow areas there. So, there's this frowning expression there, and this is something not within part of the smiling facial expressions. So, frowning is actually more particular in the expression of sadness, fear and anger. That makes me wonder, actually, what is he… not only feeling, but is there something that he wants to tell you that he’s feeling? That complexity is interesting here.
PRESENTER:
That’s Winton Au, a professor of psychology. We spoke to him about how we express our emotion and respond to other people’s faces and emotions on a more primal level.
WINTON AU:
We tend to think that when we feel something, we express that in our facial expressions. So, it's our emotions, they are determining the way we express emotions, but actually this can turn the other way round. So, if we put on our different emotional expressions, facial expressions, that will affect our feelings too. What it means is that basically if you put on a happy smile, then you're more likely to feel happy; you put on a sad face, you're more likely to feel sad. So, this is what we call the facial feedback loop.
PRESENTER:
Clearly, our emotions and facial expressions have some complex and interesting correlations. Looking back at Geng Jianyi’s work with its conflicting indicators of happiness and anger, how do you feel now—and does it make you think differently about how this person was feeling?
