 Hi, my name is Tracy DiRama Espinosa, and this is a video on faces and the role they play in learning. One of the main jumping off points to discuss the role of faces is Paul Ekman's work. Back in the 70s, he did some amazing research that was really, looking from an anthropological perspective, were there emotions that were universally perceived by all people? And he managed to find six things that, across cultures, everywhere, independent of age, pretty much most people could recognize the same six core emotions, which is pretty powerful, right? And so do you know which face this is? So this one, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness, those are the core emotions that pretty much just about anybody around the world was able to recognize. And so when he noticed this, he actually tried to figure out what were these facial muscles that actually changed in order to perceive this. And Ekman went on to do some pretty fantastic research that really documented these more than I think it's over 200 different changes that your facial muscles can make, which actually then make that perception clear to other people. This is a sad face, an angry face. And so what was so interesting is that contempt was sort of added to this list and separated out from disgust, believe it or not, two terrible emotions, right? But these are perceived as now being very distinct because Ekman was able to show there are slightly different changes in the way the mouth moves or whatever between contempt and disgust. Therefore, they were two distinct emotions. And most people can actually make that distinction as well. So the idea is that there may be these basic emotions that exist. As we mentioned in class a little bit before I asked you, are you happy because you smile or are you smiling because you're happy? And the bottom line answer was both, right? Which is very, very interesting because this goes to this basic neurophysiology. Your brain is actually associating these particular movements, right? Since your brain adopts to what it does most. If every time, you know, I'm doing this, my brain says, ah, you're happy, happy. So I've related this physical movement in my face to this emotion of happiness. This means that I could actually make myself feel happy by smiling. So it's not only that I smile because I'm happy, but I can be happy because I'm smiling, right? So we realize that facial recognition is in a very unique part of the brain. So we know that seeing is managed a lot by this occipital cortex, right? But there's this face called the fusiform gyrus that has a facial recognition element that is pretty unique. It's different from seeing other objects like noticing a house is not the same thing as noticing a face. So these things that faces are in a unique place in the brain and suggested that it has to do with an evolutionally developmental aspect of the human brain. That seeing faces and understanding their emotional context, is this a happy face? Is this a scary face? Was actually very beneficial to humans as far as evolution was concerned in knowing who is in your tribe and in a different tribe. Recognizing if their faces look like yours was also very important. So other but also kind of disturbing studies are that seven month old babies pay more attention to fearful faces than to happy faces. Now can you guess why that would be? Basically a happy face isn't going to hurt you, right? But if a face looks mean or looks like it's in fear, it's a real big red flag, big signal to us that we have to be worried about something. So even the seven month old babies have that subtle sense of understanding a facial differentiation because of survival value. So there was a lot of talk back of the turn of the century about mirror neurons. But you should be aware of them. Don't be convinced by them because most of the research just hasn't panned out. It was thought that mirror neurons were neurons that fired both when you did something like throw a baseball as well as when you watched somebody else throwing a baseball. And this was pretty interesting because it led to a lot of theories about empathy, how we begin to feel for other people by actually feeling their emotional states as well. It's a lot of ideas about human self-awareness, theory of mind, maybe even autism. But these were pretty much shut down because after about 10 years of research they weren't able to really show anything really definitive. You might want to look at a Keizer study in 2009 trying to sort of put everything into place. It's well worth understanding mirror neurons, but they have not really been proven to do what we thought they did. Like this is the key to empathy is all in mirror neurons. What we do know, however, is that even before infants can speak, they actually read faces. So we know that this is a huge communication tool, right? It's not only useful to distinguish faces of strangers and of people that we know, but also to understand things that would be helpful in preserving our life, right? If a face looks angry or fearful or disgusted, it gives us a big survival benefit if we are able to understand those emotional states. And since the amygdala actually functions from before birth and can actually do this processing of emotions, there is the hypothesis that even newborns perceive facial expression and begin to react accordingly by the time they're around seven months of age. So faces and voices are a particularly powerful combination, right? The brain judges people's faces and their tones of voice almost immediately and very unconsciously. We're not very explicitly aware of how we read other people's faces, but we do it all the time. It's a real clear way for survival value to kick in, right? And kids, students have been shown, and this is in studies by Imam Le and Simon Cisco, is that people, students actually judge the quality of their teachers just by the expressions on their face in the first few words they say. Basically, you know, is this person worth believing or do they have something to teach me by the way that they communicate through facial expressions? So not even the words they say, but the tones of voice they use and the expressions that they transmit through their facial movements. And what's so interesting is that you can ask the teacher afterwards what they thought that they were transmitting, and it can be totally misread by the student. But what matters is the student's perception. It doesn't matter what you meant to do as a teacher. What matters is the message that was received, not the message sent, right? So key point in how we manage our classrooms. So big ideas here are that we talk a lot about maybe body language and nonverbal communication, but teachers are rarely taught how to manage their facial expressions, their tone of voice in order to convey the right messages. We can also see that students are kind of unforgiving in that sense and that what's really more important is how they have perceived what you intended to transmit through your facial expressions, not the actual message. So this is why, you know, somebody can say, you know, you are doing fine. So your words, you're doing fine or you're doing fine. The way they look, their face carries much more of a message than the words themselves. OK, so those are some of the big ideas to take away from this and that we have to think and be more conscious of how we're actually transmitting messages using our face and tone of voice, which is very, very distinct from perhaps what we intend. So I guess the big, big idea is to sort of, you know, check our presumptions. We are so lucky if you live in Hawaii, for example, and you get to see people who look very, very different all the time, which means you might habituate a way of understanding facial expressions and read them very successfully. But if you're somebody who lives in a place that might be a little less cosmopolitan, a little less mixed as far as races are concerned, it may be very, very difficult for you to understand or read a face. Or if you live in a cosmopolitan society, but you stay to one certain ethnic group or neighborhood or whatever, it also becomes harder for you to read faces that come from different racial backgrounds. So think about that. Be conscious of it because we may sometimes be misinterpreting, oh, that kid looked at me funny, or oh, he's got it in from me, or he's never liked me very much, or just think about that. I mean, let's check our presumptions in at the door and think a little bit, are we misinterpreting the way we're reading those people's faces? Because maybe they're just being curious or insightful, and we think they're looking at us like they're in disgust, but it might just be that they're, you know, thinking about things differently, but we're not reading their face as well. Okay, so let's continue to think about that, reflect a lot more, and I look forward to discussing this in class with you. Thanks.