You must be wondering what I am talking about—I am referring to the Mona Lisa. In the last decade, she has received over 100 million visitors. Whether you are an art fan or not, something about the Mona Lisa's facial expression has attracted both admiration and scorn, even inspiring an Oscar-winning song by Nat King Cole.
 
However, today's post is not about Leonardo da Vinci's famous work but rather the interpretations ascribed to facial expressions. I recently discussed the efficacy of online group coaching and how a coach can establish connections and co-create the coaching experience without all the visual cues you get when working with groups in person.
 
The world of hybrid working will only continue to grow. Many of us have mastered online meetings, but for those who attend these meetings on autopilot due to back-to-back schedules, it is important to reflect on the subtle messages our facial expressions convey.
 
The Science
A study by Martinez et al. (2016) examined the critical role of body language and facial cues in rapidly perceiving and distinguishing basic emotional expressions like anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. It will come as no surprise that the researchers found that the face and body provide complementary information, with bodies beneficial for detecting high-arousal emotions like anger and threats from a distance, allowing for more accurate emotion recognition.
 
What makes this research interesting is using video as a medium of testing. The researchers created dynamic video stimuli of actors portraying these emotions through facial expressions and body movements. They then presented these videos in three formats – intact (face and body visible), face-only (body masked), and body-only (face masked) – to study how well people could recognise the emotions from faces alone, bodies alone, or the combined face and body cues.
 
The key findings were:
 
Even brief exposures of 250 milliseconds provided enough information to identify emotions from faces, bodies, or combined face+body cues above the chance level.
 
Recognition patterns differed across emotions when viewing faces alone versus bodies. For example, angry bodies were recognised almost as accurately as angry faces, suggesting an advantage for detecting threats from body cues alone.
 
Happy faces were rarely misinterpreted as negative emotions, but happy bodies were frequently misperceived as anger, indicating bodies convey arousal/agitation cues better than valence (positive/negative) information.
 
The context in which an emotion is perceived (e.g., the environment or situation) can modulate the reliance on facial expressions or body language (Martinez et al., 2016).
 
What does this mean?
 
We lose the congruence that body and facial expressions afford us on screens, as we are all reduced to a small box. As the study by Martinez et al. (2016) suggests, happy faces are rarely misinterpreted as negative emotions, much like the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile.
 
The unique online context modulates our reliance on facial expressions, which means every look, batting an eyelid, and body movement (whether you lean in or lean out) is scrutinised. This can be a source of superpower for many, as in meetings, you rarely have the opportunity to see all faces at once. Use it!
 
For those leading teams, this is an opportunity to observe and learn the nuances of your team members. Additionally, it is an opportunity to adopt the stance you want to take with limited effort. We all know that swans moving on a lake are a picture of elegance in motion, but the activity beneath the water's surface is hidden from the eye. We do not see the hard work conducted by the swan's webbed feet, which propels the graceful motion we see and admire. Focus on your graceful face and less on the feet (body in our case) so that you can transmit that calmness to others.
 
Finally, be careful what you do online. We read your facial expressions and the body language shown through the screen.
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A quote to reflect on:
 
"True worth is as inevitably discovered by the facial expression, as its opposite is sure to be clearly represented there. The human face is nature's tablet; the truth is certainly written thereon." ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater
 
A question for you to reflect on:
 
Your face is the primary source of emotional information, particularly for emotions like happiness, sadness, and anger (Martinez et al., 2016). What is your face truthfully saying? And is that what you want to convey?
 
Further reading:
Martinez, L., Falvello, V. B., Aviezer, H., & Todorov, A. (2016). Contributions of facial expressions and body language to the rapid perception of dynamic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 30(5), 939-952. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1035229