Maybe it’s because of hump day maybe its the venti cappuccino, but I was unusually chipper on my morning commute. On the subway, I had my head up and was looking about at all the people. Such a range of expressions! Some people bored. Some looked pained. Some were drained. Some were happy like me. Edgar Allen Poe once said that he could quite accurately know what a man was feeling by copying his facial expression. I tried doing this with a few people, and it was as if I could read their entire story. I was amazed at how I created a story for just about everyone once I copied their face. When I copied the bug-eyed expression of the young girl sitting across from me, I could feel that she was overwhelmed with work. When I copied the slow smiling expression of the old man next to her, I felt that he was a retired school teacher who has lived a happy life and now doesn’t have a care in the world. Now I’m sure none of my stories were accurate, sadly, I’m not a psychic. I am sure that I was able to grasp the emotional story.
When I was an actress in college, we did a similar exercise where one person would think deeply about an emotional memory, and the other would try to determine the memory based on imitating the facial expressions. Rarely did anyone guess the exact event, but the emotional story was uncannily spot on. For example maybe I would think about bringing my son home from the hospital, and my partner would guess “are you thinking about getting a new puppy”?
We can read each other so well through imitation because emotions and expressions are co-variant. This means that the cause and effect between emotions and expressions goes both ways. Happiness makes us smile, but smiling also makes us happy. Think about that for a minute. We can absorb a person’s emotional state simply by copying his or her face. You can also make yourself happy by smiling. Since people’s expressions tend to be in sync, you can literally make the people around you happy by smiling. Keep that in mind. Smiling is contagious, why not infect a few people?
