The “notâ€face is a universal part of language

Researchers have identified a single, universal facial expression that is interpreted across many cultures as the embodiment of negative emotion.

The look proved identical for native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language (ASL).

It consists of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and raised chin, and because we make it when we convey negative sentiments, such as “I do not agree,” researchers are calling it the “not face”.

The study, published in the journal Cognition, also reveals that our facial muscles contract to form the “not face” at the same frequency at which we speak or sign words in a sentence. That is, we all instinctively make the “not face” as if it were part of our spoken or signed language.

What’s more, the researchers discovered that ASL speakers sometimes make the  “not face” instead of signing the word “not”, a use of facial expression in ASL that was previously undocumented.

“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language,” said Aleix Martinez, cognitive scientist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University.

“Where did language come from? This is a question that the scientific community has grappled with for a very long time,” he continued. “This study strongly suggests a link between language and facial expressions of emotion.” Why focus on negative expressions? Charles Darwin believed that the ability to communicate danger or aggression was key to human survival long before we developed the ability to talk, Martinez explained. So the researchers suspected that if any truly universal facial expressions of emotion exist, then the expression for disapproval or disagreement would be the easiest to identify. To test the hypothesis, they sat 158 Ohio State students in front of a camera. Students were filmed as they had a casual conversation with the person behind the camera in their native language.

If the grammatical marker of negation is universal, the researchers reasoned, then all the study participants would make similar facial expressions when using that grammatical marker, regardless of which language they were speaking or signing. They should all make the same “not face” in conjunction with — or in lieu of — the spoken or signed marker of negation. The researchers manually tagged images of the students speaking, frame by frame, to show which facial muscles were moving and in which directions. Then computer algorithms searched the thousands of resulting frames to find commonalities among them. A “not face” emerged: The furrowed brows of “anger” combined with the raised chin of “disgust” and the pressed-together lips of “contempt”. Regardless of language and whether they were speaking or signing, the participants’ faces displayed these same three muscle movements when they communicated negative sentences.
Source: www.sciencedaily.com