It may just look a bit like the disappointed emoji, but according to new research the 'not face' is actually a universal marker of negative feeling.
In a study published in *Cognition,*a team at Ohio State University detail what they call the 'Not Face', a "facial expression that is interpreted across many cultures as the embodiment of negative emotion".
The face, made up of a "furrowed brown and pursed lips", was found to be identical for speakers of several languages, including English, Spanish, Mandarin and American Sign Language, and coveys negative sentiments like "I do not agree".
The use of the "not face" is so prevalent, in fact, that many speakers of American Sign Language use it in place of signing the word for "not". "To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language,” said Aleix Martinez, who lead the study. "This study strongly suggests a link between language and facial expressions of emotion."
The face is a mixture of three expressions -- anger, disgust and contempt -- that were identified using an algorithm. The team said 21 distinct expressions were identified using this algorithm, as well as a combination of these expressions. The team use the example of "happily disgusted" as such a compound -- a face we apparently might make when "an adorable baby poops in its diaper". Negative emotions would be easier to identify, the team hypothesised, because "ability to communicate danger or aggression was key to human survival long before we developed the ability to talk".
As part of the study 158 students were photographed and filmed having a conversation in their native language while researchers looked for "facial grammatical markers". Questions were asked that were likely to elicit a negative response, such as asking about a rise in tuition fees, and in each linguistic group the team measured negative grammatical markers. From, this, "the not face emerged". "Regardless of language -- and regardless of whether they were speaking or signing -- the participants' faces displayed these same three muscle movements when they communicated negative sentences," said Martinez. "This facial expression not only exists, but in some instances, it is the only marker of negation in a signed sentence," he said. "Sometimes the only way you can tell that the meaning of the sentence is negative is that person made the 'not face' when they signed it."
The team now hope to improve on their algorithm by making it automatic -- this research depended on months of painstaking manual work in identifying facial expressions. They hope to test this algorithm using a thousand hours of YouTube footage -- "around 100 million still frames" -- with an end goal of analysing 1 billion frames. This project is expected to "take decades".
Facial recognition software and algorithms have widely explored the way we use our faces linguistically. Microsoft has an AI that can predict emotion by your facial expression -- though when WIRED tested it, it only worked on negative emotions. Software has also sought to unlock the secrets of the faces of both Tom Hanks and Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Apple recently acquired the emotion-reading AI company Emotient, which uses 'KPIs' to measure the attention, engagement and sentiment of people viewing ads, TV and films.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
