Kim Wanten is a Dutch expert in the area of facial coding: what do our facial expressions say? She's written an extensive article (Dutch) of which a (long) summary follows.Facial Coding originates with Charles Darwin who discovered in 1872 that facial expressions are natural and comparable to those of orangutans. He concluded that we, long before we could communicate verbally, communicated using facial expressions. After that it took until the middle of the 60s before Paul Ekman took up where Darwin left off. Ekman discovered that facial expressions are universal and uniform.
Even people who are born blind have the same facial expressions as people born with sight. Even tribes in Papua New Guinea which have never before been in contact with Western civilization uses facial expressions in the same way as everyone else on the planet. Ekman catalogued 43 facial muscles that together result in about 3,500 facial relevant expressions. All these muscles are divided into 24 Action Units that make up the 7 base emotions of a person. This system is called FACS (Facial Action Coding System).
The 7 base emotions are:
- Anger
- Envy
- Dislike
- Fear
- Sadness
- Surprise
- Genuine smile
- Social smile (a face smile that doesn’t involve the muscles surrounding the eye)
Facial Coding is a scientific method that uses FACS to measure the 7 human base emotions which originate from our subconscious emotional brain.
Measuring Method
Our brain processes information backwards. First a stimuli enter our old brain (the green part). Here it’s processes intuitively and subconsciously. The old brain matches patterns, which means it automatically compared new experiences to previous ones. Then the stimuli is sent to our subconscious emotional brain (the red part) where it assigns a value to the stimuli (for example and emotion). And eventually the stimuli is sent to our rational brain (the yellow part) that fulfills a role more closely resembling that of a lobbyist than having any real influence on the stimuli. It gives us an ‘intellectual alibi’ that allows us to defend or justify purchases regarding family and friends and that way rule out cognitive dissonance.
By now most people will have heard of the 95/5 split. 95% of all stimuli are processes emotionally subconsciously, only 5% is a rational result. Mind that the old and emotional brain are subconscious systems, only the rational brain is conscious. Because Facial Coding deals with these three processing levels, they also measure the three different levels:
- Eye Tracking in the old brain to figure out which stimuli are being observed, how long, with which intensity and in which order.
- Facial Coding to figure out what people feel during a witnessed stimuli (this is synchronized with Eye Tracking in ‘per second graphs’).
- Rational response to the stimuli in which people have to give a vocal answer. This way they measure if what people say matches what they feel (the facial expression).
This methods isn’t just used for ads or tv commercials, but also for composing job interviews, speeches, people in a lot of publicity, etc.
So far a translated quote from Kim.
These insights are of the utmost importance to brands, companies and instances that will enter the dialogue. In future, they’ll use these insights real time. A fashion coaching brand can show a piece virtually and measure the emotional response acutely and go on to the next proposal. This research is of the utmost importance in order to get to this stage.