In the meantime, it lends scientific proof to a century-old suspicion. Lee imagines someday their work could help people with autism or others with difficulty reading emotional cues. “Emotional expressive changes around the eye influence how we see, and in turn, this communicates to others how we think and feel,” Anderson says. The study also found that temporal wrinkles were associated with joy while curved eyebrows were associated with sadness. Today, we still squint when we’re suspicious and grow wide-eyed when we’re surprised, and those observing us still make those associations. (Their prior research also suggests lip curls and nose wrinkles, also associated with disgust, narrowed nasal passages, blocking smell). In contrast, when they expressed disgust, with eyes squinting and nose wrinkled, their vision became sharper, just like when narrowing a camera lens aperture-useful for a hunter examining a piece of suspect meat before deciding whether to eat it. This could be useful for detecting predators. Previous research by Anderson and Lee showed when subjects demonstrated a look of fear, with eyes open and brow raised, they became more sensitive to light, just like when a camera lens aperture opens. States close to each other are more likely to be confused. Joy is associated with temporal wrinkles, furrowed brows with anger. The facial expressions map shows the relationship between mental states and eye features, with fear and surprise associated with wide eyes while disgust and anger are associated with narrowed eyes. Sixty-seven percent of the time the openness of the eye was a primary sign of emotion, with wide eyes signaling fear, surprise, awe and squinted eyes signaling opposite sentiments such as disgust, anger, and hate. Using the participants answers, the researchers then used computer modeling to develop a “mental state map” unraveling precisely which eye features were associated with which emotions. “When looking at the face, the eyes dominate emotional communication,” Anderson concludes. Even when the lower face was shown making an incongruous expression, the subjects still got it right most of the time. When looking at the eyes alone, the subjects got the emotion right about 90 percent of the time. Subjects were then shown the images on a computer screen, along with the name of one of the six basic emotions or 44 more complex ones (awe, cowardice, hate, suspicion, love) and asked to rank whether the eyes matched the emotion. For each image, the researchers measured seven features: eye openness (distance from top to bottom of eye), eyebrow distance, eyebrow slope, eyebrow curvature, nasal wrinkles, wrinkles near the temples and wrinkles below the eyes. He and co-author Adam Anderson, a professor of neuroscience at Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, created images of six composite eye expressions (sadness, disgust, anger, joy, fear and surprise) created from ethnically diverse databases of faces. Lee's latest paper, published in the journal Psychological Science in February, examined precisely which eye features people use as they try to decode whether someone is fearful or disgusted, angry or surprised and how that decoding system came to be. “Our research suggests these expressions evolved for functional reasons first-to help the expresser gather more information and enhance his or her chances for survival-and were later co-opted as communication tools.” “We know that our eyes are extremely important for social signaling, but to understand why that is you have to go back to Darwin’s theories,” says Daniel Lee, a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Cognitive Science who has been studying facial expressions for eight years. In fact, they probably helped the human race survive. Researcher Daniel Lee has been studying facial expressions for eight years.
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