[Xmca-l] Re: What Faces Can’t Tell Us

[Martin John Packer]

On Mar 2, 2014, at 1:55 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@UGA.EDU> wrote:

> If faces do not “speak for themselves,” how do we manage to “read” other people? The answer is that we don’t passively recognize emotions but actively perceive them, drawing heavily (if unwittingly) on a wide variety of contextual clues — a body position, a hand gesture, a vocalization, the social setting and so on.

Peter, can you say more about why this bothered you? Yes, it's laboratory research, but personally I find these conclusions more convincing than the notion that there is a universal code of facial muscle movements.

Martin