Is Body Language Analysis Reliable?

The New Science of Emotion Digging The Grave for BLA

It is August 2020. The whole country is still in shock following the demise of Sushant Singh Rajput. While it was initially thought to be suicide, new hypotheses by ardent fans have pinned the blame for the actor’s ‘murder’ on his girlfriend, Rhea Chakraborty.

We are out for blood. We want her and her family destroyed forever. Social media ridicule is not enough. We want justice. This is when Chakraborty appears for an interview with NDTV to present her side of the story. The interview does not help as much as she probably thought it would. Instead, we see ‘body language experts’ sharing videos and screenshots of an inflated nose, eyes looking sideways or hands holding each other to “prove” that she is lying and that she did indeed play a role in the murder.

But is this really scientifically true? Can your body or your face give you away when trying to deceive someone?

Straight-up answer: Not really.

The more complex answer: It depends on what you mean by ‘scientifically’.

The Pursuit of Human Emotions and Expressions

Human emotions have been the subject of philosophy for time immemorial. Since the times of Plato, we have been trying to understand these internal psychic and bodily experiences that we all have, and call ‘emotions’.

We know we experience them and we know we express them as well. If not verbally, then sometimes as non-verbal cues through our body or our faces. We scowl when we are angry 😠. We raise one eyebrow when we are inquisitive 🤨 and we smile when we are happy 😁 but can we confidently say that all those who smile are happy, all those who scowl are angry and all those who have an eyebrow raised are inquisitive, and not Carlo Ancelotti?

We probably cannot.

But still, we choose to use heuristics (mental shortcuts) to infer emotions from someone’s facial expression. It is easier after all. The problem begins when we start treating these heuristic understandings of human emotions as facts.

Today, body language analysts claim they can tell what a person is feeling or trying to communicate from their posture, their hand movements, their eye movements or their blinking frequency. They sell courses trying to teach others to do the same and wrap it up as teaching the ability to detect lies simply through observation.

At the heart of these analysts and their analysis is the foundational idea that each human emotion has a specific somatic equivalent that gets expressed physically. This physical expression may be conscious or unconscious but it is there, and it is very very specific for each emotion, or so they claim.

But empirical research has shown human emotions are not that simple.

The Modern Pioneer: L.F. Barrett

L.F. Barrett and her work on human emotions have ushered in a new understanding of human emotionality which is compared to the theory of evolution by scope and impact.

If you don’t know her name already, I urge you to read up on her and her work. This article should be a good place to start. Facial Expression Do Not Reveal Emotions

One thing Barrett has found over and over again in her research is that human emotions are not specific to a particular part of your face or your body. That means a person can be experiencing different emotions while having the same expression and the same emotion may have different expressions among different people.

Emotions don’t have an essential expression per se. The only rule in emotional expression is variation. We have different expressions of different emotions depending on our culture, our age, sex, the time we are living in and even our situation at any given moment.

This knowledge is based on decades of empirical studies and their review over the years….but that is where the word of caution comes as well.

The Limits of Empiricism

I have discussed this before in my other issues as well, but empiricism has a major issue when it comes to being an epistemological method. Empiricism demands that we crystallize broad human experiences into tiny parts which are easy to quantify and study as much as possible.

So an empirical study on face reading would not look at the whole face but at the muscles moving on the face which leads to an expression. It would try to understand the moment at which a muscle gets activated and when it goes back to rest and the refractory period before it can activate again.

Of course, we miss out on the larger picture at times there due to that. Empiricism is not perfect but is a damn good way to pursue the scientific method. That is what I meant in my complex answer at the beginning.

Empirically, microexpressions or body language analysis or face reading are not reliable or generalizable ways to infer human emotions or detect deceptions.

Today these body language analysts and face readers make sweeping claims based on their knowledge. Even the legal system sometimes uses microexpressions and body language analysis to detect whether a witness is lying or not. Artificial Intelligence Systems are being used to detect human emotions based on facial movements and all that is based on an idea that is not empirically valid.

And thus, until the whole world understands that our heuristics are not substitutes for empirical knowledge, face reading and body language will continue to be dead sciences walking.

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And that is it for this week! This is your last chance to be a part of the giveaway I am running. Here are the rules for participation.

I will pick three random 5-star readers and gift them two books.

1. Shhh! Don’t Talk About Mental Health by Arjun Gupta and,

2. Any book of their choice! (Please don’t make it an academic one :P)

To become a five-star reader, you need to read at least 6 issues of this newsletter and leave a comment on a few of them to become eligible for the giveaway. Reply to this email to have a stronger chance of becoming a 5-star reader too.

Results will be announced next week!