By Kiefer Dooley
Charles Darwin once said that “the face is a billboard for the heart.” The sentiment of this statement is widely held as truth by most people. Humans wear their feelings on their faces. For us in the land of plenty in 2019, we take in a lot of information about others based on what we see. This is only furthered through our consumption of media, whether it be a TV show or a novel.
In the most popular sitcom of all time, Friends, Season 5, Episode 14, “The One Where Everyone Finds Out,” Ross comes to discover that his best friend is in love with his sister. Even if viewing with the TV on mute, a viewer would know that Ross is conveying surprise and shock. His face says it all. . . eyebrows raised, eyes wide, jaw dropped. We make sense of other facial expressions as well. If we see someone frowning, we think that person must be unhappy or upset. A smile means happy or amused. Wrinkled eyebrows? Concern or worry.
In his most recent book, Talking to Strangers, Malcom Gladwell explains that people often follow a generalized set of beliefs about a stranger’s facial expression, assuming that what they see on a person’s face equates to what the other must be feeling. In other words, we believe in rules of transparency or that we can correctly infer non-verbal information about others based on facial cues.
Interestingly, this translates to how we feel about ourselves. We often believe that we ‘know’ how our own face appears simply based on how we are feeling.
Gladwell explores an experiment by German psychologists Achim Schützwohl and Rainer Reisenzein to investigate this very question. Do we know what our faces look like when we are surprised?
Imagine that you were led down a long narrow hallway into a dark room. You sit and listen to a recording of Frank Kafka short story, followed by a memory test of what you’ve just heard. After finishing the test, you exit the room to return from where you came. Upon your exit you discover that instead of being in a hallway, you’re in an entirely different room. It’s been rearranged. Where there was once a dark corridor, there is now a square room with bright green walls and a single, red chair illuminated by one light bulb hanging from the ceiling. A room where a room should not be. You are surprised! But, what would be written on your face?
According to the world presented by Friends, you’d have Ross’s face. Or, Joey’s face in the next episode when he rushes into Monica’s apartment and discovers two of his best friends about to fight each other. His face tells you everything you need to know. Eyebrows shooting up. Eyes going wide. Jaw dropping.
Schützwohl and Reisenzein created the Kafka scenario and ran 60 people through it. Afterword, they asked the participants to rate their feelings of surprise on a scale of 1-10. The average for all 60? 8.14. Highly surprised! Next, they asked if the participants felt that the shock was displayed on their face. All of the respondents were convinced that surprise was written all over their faces.
A video camera in the corner proved otherwise. After coding the participants’ facial expressions in the moments after they exited into the room where a hallway should have been, Schützwohl and Reisenzein discovered that only five percent of cases had wide eyes, shooting eyebrows and dropped jaws. In 17 percent of the cases, they found two
of those expressions. In the rest, they found nothing that would normally associate with surprise at all.
The participants’ highly overestimated their surprise expressivity. Why? They inferred their likely facial expressions to the surprising event based on what they felt their face should look like. An inference made from living in a society that assumes truth about life from reading novels where a character’s “jaw drops with astonishment” or “eyes widen in shock,” or from watching TV sitcoms where heroes show the “Joey face.” In most cases, this inference was erroneous.
If you are super into sociology like me, you’d find this study and its conclusions fascinating. You’d also wonder things like . . .
● What do real people actually look like when they are surprised?
● Am I shaped into the person I am by factors beyond my control?
● Maybe I don’t watch Friends very often, but is the structure of the world I live in influencing me to believe one way when reality is another?
● Or, is it possible that we can allow outside factors to influence the way we feel about our own spiritual walk to the point that we’re getting it wrong? That we believe our heart is expressing through our bodies in one way, when in fact it actually appears like something else entirely?
Are we getting it wrong?
Fortunately, as Christians, we have the truth. And His name is Jesus. When everything else is uncertain, Jesus is the way. Live in the world, but not of the world. Allow the Father into your heart and let His way inform your steps. Partake in the Word and know Christ.
When you’re in the Word, you’ll see yourself (and others) clearly. There will be no chance for folk psychology, pop culture or even church culture to influence the way you think about or assign expressivity to your spiritual journey, because there will be no stranger—only the true you. Inform the way you see yourself and your spiritual walk through direct connection with the Father, because in the end your face should be a billboard for the heart of Christ.
–Kiefer Dooley is RMC youth director. Email him at: [email protected]