You were watching your favorite celebrity couple on the red carpet last night. They have always been so perfect for each other, and in many ways you’ve fantasized that your own relationships would model theirs. But now you are tuned in to the gossip from the event and some body language expert is talking about your fave couple, saying, “Those two are so breaking up.” But how would this person know what they are thinking of doing? This just can’t be true. What are they seeing that you can’t see? The two of them look so perfect together, holding hands and kissing in front of the paparazzi. But the expert shows a freeze-frame of one of their faces close up and points to a snarl of contempt that to the expert signals the end of their romance. Is that true?
ONE OF THE BENEFITS of modern digital media is that we can freeze the frame and pick out a single moment from a variety of events and places, zoom in on it and let our opinions fly. This exemplifies the epitome of getting a thin slice of data and extrapolating an overgeneralized prediction from it. But what is this momentary key signal showing you, and is there really any value in using one-thirtieth of a second to make a decisive comment on the future of a relationship? Is the expert giving too much power to one picture? Whether you are discussing the fate of your role model celebrity relationship as in this scenario, or that of a friend, or your own relationship, it is in your best interests to suspend judgment, be more descriptive, and critically think about what is really going on.
Let’s look at this micro-expression of contempt in the wider context of the history of the science of micro-expressions. In their 1966 study, Haggard and Isaacs first outlined how they discovered micro-expressions, or “micromomentary” expressions while “scanning motion picture films of psychotherapy hours, searching for indications of non-verbal communication between therapist and patient.”1 They recognized and described those moments where an underlying emotion slips out in an almost imperceptibly quick facial expression.
Further to this in a series of studies, Paul Ekman’s research found notable similarities between people from diverse Western and Eastern cultures in the way their emotional labels fit facial expressions. Ekman was the first to document some universal expressions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Ekman and colleague Wallace Friesen later added contempt to the list of universal facial expressions.2 The micro-expression for contempt is the action of the face pulling up a trace on just one side at the corner of the lip, with a slight dimple in the cheek.
Following from this, American psychologist John Gottman began video-recording living relationships, specifically looking at participants’ facial expressions. Gottman was able to correlate these expressions with relationships that would last and those that would not. Malcolm Gladwell reports in his best-selling book Blink Gottman’s theory that there are four major emotional reactions destructive to a marriage: defensiveness, which is described as a reaction toward a stimulus as if you were being attacked; stonewalling, which is when a person refuses to communicate or cooperate with another; criticism, which is the practice of judging the merits and faults of a person; and the worst of all, contempt, which is a general attitude that is a mixture of the primary emotions disgust and anger.3
BODY LANGUAGE MYTHBUSTER
Contempt Signals a Breakup
So there you have it. Contempt—an emotion people can express in the blink of an eye, signaled with an asymmetrical gesture where one side of the mouth rises in a kind of half-smile, is the strongest indicator that the relationship is doomed.
Well, hang on, though.
It turns out that although Gottman saw the biggest correlation between contempt and a couple’s not getting along, his study was a regression analysis. He took couples who had broken up and then looked at film of them in therapy and noticed there were feelings of contempt (i.e., a sense of not valuing the other). Given this, it would be generalization and even overstatement to create a causal, predictive analytic model that says if you see contempt, then there will always be a breakup. The look of contempt is not the cause but a symptom or response.
Furthermore, though many people enjoy the benefit of being able to recognize micro-expressions, usually through training, facial expression is only one aspect of body language; that is, the rest of the body and what it may be communicating is ignored.
And certainly it would be almost a blind gamble for anyone, even the experts, to predict an outcome from just a few frames of video. Like some gambling, though, if you do it enough you can increase your chance of being right, but also your chance of being wrong. When you win, you look great, especially for experts in the media, and when you lose, you hope nobody calls you out on television. However, if you lose in a real-life situation, the stakes are certainly higher for you.
In this celebrities scenario, let’s also take context into account by looking at how the media can manipulate and use images for entertainment, and how some celebrities might use their relationships for marketing purposes.
The media and the celebrities they feature are part of, in some cases, an extremely strategic marketing community. The celebrities are selling something (a film, show merchandise, perfume), and the media use the power of the celebrities’ notoriety to create content that attracts viewers to the space where the media are advertising for their own clients. In this respect, the media–celebrity relationship with you, the observer—or they might say “consumer”—is predicated on the process of selling something and cannot necessarily be viewed as a normality of most people’s lives. What we see as “real life” for celebrities on the red carpet is often being somewhat curated in certain ways to create engagement and buy-in from audiences, perhaps a little like the way you might curate your own Facebook page or Instagram account, posting only what fits with the impression you want to give.
In your “real life,” however—unless you and your friends are celebrities and heavily invested in the business of sponsorship tie-ins, sales, publicity contracts and so on—deciding that a couple is on the verge of a breakup based on a fleeting look of contempt would be quite a stretch. You would need to consider a host of other factors, what else could be going on—essentially, context. Real life does not necessarily imitate or reflect life on the red carpet, however much you may identify with your celebrity heroes.
So what else might you ask and look for that would help you predict a couple’s impending breakup? Another body language sign showing that contempt is underlying the negative tone in a relationship is eye-rolling (which we also look at elsewhere in this book). This signal shows disapproval of the other and a rejection of understanding and empathy. Eye-rolling also fits into Gottman’s model as it can be a symptom of defensiveness, part and parcel of stonewalling and a sign of criticism. Sticking with Gottman’s model, the micro-expressions indicating disgust or anger and potential breakup that may be visible upon close freeze-framed inspection are anger—vertical lines between the brows, brows drawn together, tensed lower lid, tight and narrow lips, glaring eyes, dilated nostrils, jutting lower jaw (as we’ve noted previously, all three facial areas must be involved in the gesture)—and disgust, demonstrated by a wrinkled nose, downturned mouth and tense lower lip. These signs also display defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism and contempt, all of which create and feed into feelings and actions of disregard, dismissal and the denigration of others’ concerns. Importantly, contempt raises your feeling of power and status above the person toward whom you are contemptuous, and holding these attitudes toward someone else leaves little room for empathy.
Empathy involves caring about the feelings of others, showing concern and nurturing relationship bonds. Empathy creates an equal leveling of status. Empathetic behaviors show up as open and positive, such as listening with open body language or gently mirroring the behavior of another, both of which are literally movements toward being in the same viewpoint or similar emotional or cognitive state as another.
It is tricky to get a baseline in our celebrity situation as to what any usual behavior might be. However, as we’ve done here, you may want to consider how you observe and judge similar personal situations. By witnessing a public display or an analysis of a display, you may be able to observe more critically your own real-life situation and potentially draw parallels, bringing up deep-seated doubts or, alternatively, putting your mind at rest by recognizing contrast.
Ultimately, it could be that the look of contempt may not be directed at the partner but could be for the media, the paparazzi or even the situation itself of needing to perform for them and of course you—the consumer—in an intimate moment. Hey, who’s to say they are not breaking up with you, the consumer voyeur of the relationship? Maybe tomorrow you will find out they are leaving the media spotlight and not their celebrity partner.
So here’s a possible new judgment: Maybe they are on course for so breaking up—with the pressure of the spotlight.
How can we test the media truth or lies around all this? Stay tuned.
QUICK SCAN
S: Suspending judgment on your initial instinctual reaction to news media can help you think critically about the images and story being shown to you. Be more descriptive of what you see to uncover what may be fact and what may be biased evaluation.
C: Many photographic images of body language lack enough context to truly evaluate the thoughts and feelings of the subjects. But with the right story around the image, a context can be implied that biases your reasoning and thinking about the subject.
A: When you ask what else may be going on in the wider context of news, entertainment and commerce, sometimes you can uncover other motives for presenting images to you with a specific narrative around them.
N: Some new judgments are impossible to test beyond staying tuned in to the stories that present the behavior to you and see how they unfold.