As I follow my friends/mavens from this tool to that I have eventually found my way to seesmic, only to find I talk out of one side of my mouth. Devastating, and probably not always true, but certainly the self-consciousness triggered by the camera seems to bring out this affectation more than I care for.
Unrelated except in time, on an email list I frequent, a pal opines that Hilary's raising of her eyebrows when she says the word "no" has some intrinsic meaning. Said pal then links to , to which I replied,
There are generally two approaches to body language of which I am aware. One, ala Julian Fast's "Body Language" from the 70s, takes a dictionary approach in which a given posture or facial expression "means" X. The other takes a systems approach, ala Gregory Bateson's "Why do Frenchmen...?" meta-log in the opening of "Steps to an Ecology of Mind". I find the former fatuous beyond bearing. I find Eckman to smell, from a distance, of the former. But I have not dipped into his work; can't get past the smell to taste the meat, as it were.
I'm generally suspicious of attempts to codify emotion. I tend to prefer an action oriented systems type view rather than a reified items view. However, in taking the online test, I found if I mimicked the expression I was better able to select the right emotion.
I discovered this first with an expression of contempt. Well, more accurately, I discovered one of the test pictures had that side-of-the-mouth thing I observed in myself on seesmic. And when I tried on that expression, the word contempt fit better than the other options. This would seem to indicate that the test has some merit. But, stipulating for conversation that there is a match, at least in my socio-cultural milieu, between that facial expression and that "emotion" (said stipulation requiring me to set aside my epistemological disinclination toward the notion of reified "emotion") there remains the question of just what is it I am contemptuous of such that I display that emotion in my seesmic vids.
The answer, of course, is the look of my own face and sound of my own voice and even the meaning or value of my words as I record and perceive the near-instant feedback from such recording.
In all, I tend to think the value of the Eckman "training" is in the meta-skill of increasing one's "sensory acuity," that is, in helping folks respond to more fine-grained phenomena than they otherwise might. (Even that misstates, for I can't imagine that we don't all already respond to all these micro-displays, but training can help make those responses more amenable to conscious control or influence.) I am still disinclined to accept a world view where "X means Y". Words don't mean. People do. So too with facial expressions, no?
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Chris L wrote
That makes sense to me. None of us live in a world where X means Y in any reliable way, wasn't that what the 80s was all about? Seriously, it seems like a percentages thing. Facial expression B doesn't mean C in any absolute way, but perhaps much or most of the time. But we can't rely on that to understand someone devoid of the context any more than we can rely on the dictionary to know what a poem means.
Quinn wrote
Read and Despair
Would you believe that I received training in "facial recognition" based on the Gladwell book, Blink? Yep, no joke. We went through a series of photos of people in various expressions, learned to give them names, then they ran the series fast - faster than you could focus on - and had us jot down what each one was. Most of us did okay. The thing is, now I am trained and my evil overlords expect me to be able to interview a foreigner, from a different culture and speaking a language that is not my own, and be able to notice blink fast facial expressions on this person and determine if he/she is lying. I wish to hell I was making this up.