Where my head is at now

For my most recent mental health writing see Natural Mental Health. Everything else promised on this site is coming, and more besides, eventually!

New header photo 2019 (photo by Nick Hewling)

Universal emotional expression (updated 2014, 2016, 2026)

Anyone familiar with the television drama Lie to me, now in it’s third session on FOX/ Sky, will know something of the work of Paul Ekman, upon who’s research it is based. Ekman has given his support to the programme, but maintains a blog on the FOX website 

to point out where and when he sees fiction portrayed as fact. Lie to me draws mainly on Ekman’s work on micro facial expressions and their connection with deception - emotional expressions which show for up to one fifth of a second before a person can consciously try to disguise them. But it is Ekman’s work on facial expressions as a whole, and their role in expressing universal emotions (as well as individual variations) which concerns me here.

It may come as a surprise to some that there are universal emotions and that they are overwhelmingly displayed on the face, of everyone - supported to varying degrees by tone of voice, and some body movement.  It may be even more surprising to learn that Ekman and his colleagues mapped the human face (43 muscles, up to 10,000 possible expressions, about a third of which are expressed emotions) and demonstrated the way emotions are transmitted through interaction, including the universals, over 30 years ago! (FACs - Facial Action Coding System 1978) A heaven sent gift you might think for mental health professionals, but how many have ever been taught them? (The CD-Rom for micro-expressions alone has been learnt by many in just one hour). Indeed one might well think that such ignorance of science by psychiatry is positively negligent, yet as Ekman has explained, it even took the Department of Psychiatry which employed him 20 years to put his research on the medical curriculum! Such things only serve to fuel one’s contempt for the world of mental health. This was one of the issues he reflected upon in an hour-long interview for the University of California at Berkeley - available on You Tube via the UC channel

Another, was how during the process of mapping the face and identifying muscles, many hours were required in front of a hand mirror. A consequence of which was the disturbing realisation of just how easily the repeated making of an emotional facial expression can cue the persistence of that emotion, how it induced a change in mood, whether it be fear or sadness.

I stumbled upon Ekman’s work about 3 years ago quite by chance, no one ever directed me to it. I found the easiest way to digest it was through two books Unmasking The Face, and Emotions Revealed. Much of it was a shock, I simply hadn’t learnt unconsciously as a child what faces show - not unrelated I’ve come to realise, to the fact that I later spent 20 years as a client of mental health services. However, for a fast introduction, go to Ekman’s website.

Darwin said it first, of course! He identified six universal expressions of emotion and implied that it is in the act of making the expression, in response to another human, that the emotion is felt. Ekman set-out to prove it and in the process added contempt. At the outset of Ekman’s career the ‘blank slate’ or ‘culturally relative’ view of almost all human behaviour held sway. What Ekman has demonstrated is that what is personal, is specific to the context an individual finds themselves in, and is always a variation built upon the structure of universal emotional expression. What remains up for debate is the extent to which emotion can be said to be made in the moment that you physically feel the shape of your face change, how much felt emotion is cued by others, how much effective communication depends on correctly learning what you are feeling, being able to communicate it to others, and make a correct interpretation of what others are showing you. Put another way, the windows through which we can understand another’s mental distress, the extent to which we can be said to ‘have empathy’ (feel what others feel) are; the facial expressions of emotion, the tone of voice, plus some supporting cues found in the gestures which support them. But when it comes to meaning, to what a particular emotion refers to, then gestures display their principal role - and that is to support language. Nonetheless, the work of people like Paul Ekman demonstrates that non-verbal behaviour and so called ‘inter-personal skills’ should really be the spine of any training in mental health, upon which all else can be hung. The pre-occupation with non-action, with non-physical cognitive skills - is just so much talk.

The first time I tested myself for recognition of emotions I scored just four out of the seven universals, let alone anything else! How many other clients like me need a program of active learning. After the anger, it occurred to me that the lack of emotional expression amongst many in mental distress may not be so much about shutting down, blocking-out, hiding or lacking emotion but simply a failure at recognition of emotion! In fact I’m more than contemptuous of some services I’m disgusted.

However, in the last couple of years I’ve gone in search of genuine smiles that can provoke happiness and managed to find one expert amongst the mental health workers I know. Surprise, surprise, she is of lowly status, on low pay and relatively lacking in formalised training - but she has the skill of hitting you with rapid-fire full smiles, up to half a dozen times a minute. An hour and a half of that re-programmes me for weeks.

(Note 2016; There was only ever one way this post was ever going to end!)

I ought to have added some time ago that I am of course aware of other approaches to the subject! For a more relativistic and social construct approach see...

It's the company you keep! (updated 2014)

(Christakis and Fowler 2008)

I've been directing people to the short article below since it first appeared on the Edge.org site almost two years ago. On the surface it's just a small investigation of a few hundred of the early student users of facebook - but give it some thought and a second read and the implications are enormous. Much of my writing on this blog insists that the real world, along with the virtual one, is like the article describes. Mental distress is made and unmade everyday through our interaction with others. When it persists for long periods we become progressively more isolated. Mapping social networks suggest how such a process works.

Social Networks and Happiness

(Nick Christakis homepage, and on video How social networks predict epidemics plus The hidden  influence of social networks)

Psychological Skill

Psychology is best understood as a set of physical skills. Now I suspect that sentence will seem odd to most readers, but a small minority will be thinking, ‘tell me something I don’t know!’

Unfortunately as my writing gets better, along with my confidence in understanding our social world, there seems to be an ever greater risk of losing what modest readership I already have. Perhaps one should just practice psychological skills, rather than try to write about them.

You see the problem is, there is this strange phenomenon of people liking mysteries and not wanting them explained. A lot of modern magicians have experimented with building explanation into their acts, but have sooner or later hit a wall - and it‘s not just a need to maintain trade secrets in order to earn a living. People want to be amazed, in awe of, and frightened (up to a point). In the world of mental health it often appears that someone in distress, does not want, nor responds to, either explicit explanation of their difficulties, or to training in techniques to relieve them. It’s even got to the point in our individualistic society where many will argue that there are no universal ways of understanding or helping - apart from the mysterious ‘love conquers all’! And the more knowledgeable person certainly doesn’t want to end up suffering the emotional isolation of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome - of going to the trouble to explain (about inductive and deductive reasoning, how he built-up his library, apprenticed himself to learn about such things as horses and dogs, the logic of railway operations and timetabling, etc, etc) only for Watson to call it all inborn ‘talent’ and ‘genius‘, the police to call it ‘luck‘, and the public ‘…well when you put it like Mr Holmes, I can see it really is so simple anyone could…’ It was others who set him apart. People fear something is lost in explanation when in fact the reverse is true - it only adds to the wonder of the world.

But there is a more fundamental problem about explanation, learning and skill. For those of us who did not learn our social skills unconsciously and naturally in early childhood, it is a cause of fascination to watch the socially skilled finding themselves quite incapable of describing what they do so self-evidently well! Conversely it is alarming to watch one’s own continuing incompetence at the same time as knowing exactly what one is doing wrong. The old truism that those who find a subject or skill difficult to learn make the best teachers, often holds-up. Now we are into the domain of tacit knowledge, the knowledge and skills we know others have, know to be vital to much social interaction, whether work or leisure, which have proved impossible to write about or codify in other ways?

There is a huge body of knowledge (useful or otherwise, effective or harmful) that one knows is learnt, over long periods of time, possibly quite unconsciously, when alongside the most experienced of practitioners. You know they have ‘it’, that’s why you place yourself alongside them; they know they have ‘it’ but can’t articulate it to you.

Consider the following. The range of human emotions are universal and so is the way they are expressed. Human emotion is communicated through facial expression and tone of voice. (Whilst thoughts are communicated through the content of speech and hand gestures). There is relatively little individual variation. Emotion is felt as your facial muscles react to what you see or hear in the other person. Emotion comes first, thoughts follow.

Some of you will be thinking ‘well that’s bleedin’ obvious’, for others it may be a ‘bolt from the blue’.

I don’t do empathy (the ability to feel what others feel). At least not very well, and not most of the time. I didn’t learn that basic human skill in early life, which most people acquire so un-self-consciously that they don’t even name it. It’s not a ‘learning disability’ - I have the capacity, it simply became blocked. Hence my adult life has been one long painful process of mechanically acquiring the skill. And I’m not fluent in it - others can see the joins, often become fearful of me, and turn away. (Doing one of Paul Ekman’s tests I correctly guessed only 3 out of the 8 universal emotional expressions - and that was with 30 seconds to think about it!)

As for a ‘theory of mind’ (knowing how others think) well, a long time ago when I was a patient on a ward a student nurse demonstrated a few NLP basics, such as the reasoning behind ‘eye accessing cues’ - you see I’m profoundly left-handed, I’ll move anti-clockwise when 90% of the population are moving clockwise.

Twenty wasted years in the psychiatric system. Being diagnosed with depression, schizoid affective disorder and manic depression - actual taught me nothing. They only described, rather inaccurately, how my limbic system reacted to such dodgy data!

Psychiatry, clinical psychology and mental health nursing don’t know they are stuck at the end of a cul de sac - ramming each other out of road rage, whilst the rest of the world passes on the main road. Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System has been available since 1978 but I know of no mental health worker who has ever learnt it. And of course any part of NLP has been thought ‘beyond the pale’ for the last twenty years.

There is much that is not mysterious. Simple laws can lead to massive complexity. Complexity does not mean something is necessarily complicated to understand. Darwin taught us that 150 years ago - he also guessed right about facial expressions!