Why are micro-expressions important?

Learning to identify micro-expressions is important for:

Increasing emotional intelligence

One of the keys to improving emotional intelligence is to develop the ability to understand people’s facial movements.

Unlike language, the face constitutes a universal system of signals that reflect people’s fluctuating feelings, moment by moment.

Knowing how to read the face helps recognise one’s own emotions and those of others.

Encouraging empathy
Emotions play a central role in all our interactions.

Common facial expressions, or macro-expressions, often inaccurately portray a person’s feelings at a given moment.

When one is able to recognise micro-expressions, one becomes more sensitive to the emotions that others are feeling and wish or do not wish to make known.

You can also determine when an emotion is beginning, or when an emotion is being hidden, or when a person is unaware of what they are feeling.

Recent research, team-led by Dr Helen Reiss, showed that some doctors’ ability to recognise emotions in a series of rapidly presented facial expressions matched the feedback given by patients on the empathic ability of those same doctors.

Identifying lies
When someone tries to hide their emotions, they often miss something that is visible in their face.

This ‘leakage’ may be limited to one part of the face (a partial or subtle expression) or it may be a very quick expression that appears all over the face (a micro-expression).

Most people do not recognise these important clues. One can learn to pick them up the moment they appear with specific training.

In the book “Telling lies” (English version: “I volti della menzogna”), Prof. Paul Ekman comprehensively analyses these and other clues of lies.

Improving Relationships
The face is the best window we have on our interlocutor’s feelings. Improving our ability to recognise the emotions of others increases our ability to create intimacy and understanding in our relationship with them.

Research also shows that people who can identify micro-expressions are generally preferred as colleagues or co-workers.

Understanding others
Prof. Paul Ekman’s research has shown that there are facial expressions that contradict the words one is saying; they are usually not seen, but it is crucial to pay attention to them.

Facial micro-expressions constitute a universal system, we all have them.

Once you learn to recognise micro-expressions, you can apply this skill with all possible interlocutors: from friends to family to total strangers.

Human beings from profoundly different cultures, who do not speak the same language, feel the same emotions and consequently have the same facial expressions.

Recognising and managing one’s emotions
Learning to recognise facial expressions related to emotions in others helps one learn to recognise one’s own.

The research work of Prof. Paul Ekman has shown that simply ‘mimicking’ an emotion with the right facial muscles initiates the physiological experience of that emotion within oneself.

When you consciously engage your facial expression with your inner experience, you are training yourself to make your deepest emotions conscious.

Thus you develop the ability to grasp the moment when you are falling prey to an emotion, and you generally improve the management of your emotions.

Developing social skills
People with autism spectrum disorders have benefited greatly from specific facial expression training, in particular the subtle expression training tool ‘SETT: Subtle Expression Training Tool’.

Team research conducted by Dr Tamara Russell has shown that with Prof. Paul Ekman’s ‘METT: Micro Expression Training Tool’, a sample of people with schizophrenia acquired an ability to recognise emotions on the faces of others equal to that of the sample of healthy people.

For more information about Paul Ekman’s Online Training Tools:https://www.igmanagement.it/micro-espressioni-facciali-training-tool-online-certificati-da-paul-ekman-in-italia/

Source:

http://www.paulekman.com/micro-expressions/why-are-micro-expressions-important/

Translation and adaptation by I&G Management

Helen Reiss and AAVVhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3445669/pdf/11606_2012_Article_2063.pdf

Tamara Russell and AAVV http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/014466505X90866/abstract