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The Gallery of Faces

For hundreds of years people have tried to read a feeling straight off a face. Walk through three of their attempts, see what each one really is, and decide for yourself how much a face can tell.

  1. 1698 · Charles Le Brun

    The passions, drawn to a system

    Two engraved heads of women looking up and to the side, labelled le Désir and L’espérance
    ✎ Imagined · a drawing to show the idea

    Two heads from Le Brun’s method for drawing the passions, published in 1698, here in an etching by Bernard Picart (1713): “desire” on the left and “hope” on the right.

    Le Brun taught painters one correct face for each passion. Cover the labels: can you tell which one is desire and which is hope? A drawn face is a rule about faces, not a person feeling something.

    Source: Etching by B. Picart, Amsterdam, 1713, after C. Le Brun, Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698). Wellcome Collection 33507i; resized for the web. · Public Domain Mark (Wellcome Collection) · the record

  2. 1862 · Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne

    A face moved by electric current

    In Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (1862) Duchenne touched single face muscles with a mild electric current and photographed what each muscle did. (The photographs are not shown here.)

    He believed a real smile always moves the muscles around the eyes. Later scientists found people can make that smile on purpose too (Krumhuber and Manstead, 2009). And a face moved by a current shows a muscle, not a feeling: the man in his photographs felt nothing of the sort.

    Source: G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, Paris, 1862; E. G. Krumhuber and A. S. R. Manstead, “Can Duchenne smiles be feigned?”, Emotion 9 (2009). · Described, not reproduced

  3. 1872 · Charles Darwin

    Posed photographs

    Four old photographs of men in dark coats making gestures: a shrug with open hands, a turned-away head
    ✓ Seen · a record of the real thing

    Plate VI, “Anger and Indignation”, of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): figures 1 and 2 are men acting indignation; figures 3 and 4 are the photographer Oscar Rejlander acting a helpless shrug.

    Darwin sent questions to observers in many countries about how people there showed their feelings, and used posed photographs to show what he meant. A posed face is an actor’s answer to “show me indignation”, which is not how a face looks in the middle of a real day.

    Source: C. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray, 1872, Plate VI (chapters X and XI); photographs by O. G. Rejlander and others. · Public domain

So what can a face tell you?

Scientists who reviewed a thousand studies found that the same face can mean many different feelings, and that people read faces through the body, the voice and what just happened (Barrett et al., 2019; Aviezer’s experiments). The best clue is still the one at the top of CueLab’s ladder: ask.

What Do You Do with the Mad That You Feel? Fred Rogers first sang it on his programme in 1968, and spoke it to a United States Senate subcommittee in 1969. Its title is the question this room leaves you with.

Source: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968); U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications hearing, 1 May 1969.

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