The face of "no" is the same worldwide

A study by a computer program says our negative facial expression is common to all languages - and even the sign language.



Frowning, pressed lips and wrinkled chin: everyone knows the "no" face. Everyone even a study of Ohio University showed for the first time, this expression is the same for English speakers, Spanish, Mandarin and even for people who communicate by sign language.

To do the analysis, the scientists used a computer program capable of recognizing 21 different facial reactions - and mixtures thereof - through pictures taken by a digital camera. If there was a face of "no," the researchers thought, it would be a combination of feelings we all have when we disagree with something and that were already in the program database: anger, disgust and contempt.

facial changes of 158 university students were studied. Each was photographed while talking to another person, who was behind the camera. The conversations were all about issues that could generate disagreement and were developing in the mother tongue of the student who was being analyzed. The languages ​​used in the study - English, Spanish and Mandarin - were chosen to represent all current, based on the Latin (such as Spanish), in Germanic (such as English) and in the ancient oriental languages ​​(like Mandarin). The sign language, in turn, entered the study to see if the face of "no" would have compared with other forms of communication beyond speech.

facial expression, his face says it all

While the conversation rolling, researchers manually photographed the process of change of expression of every person to show in detail the muscles that move. The frames were analyzed by computer, which discriminated forming expressions of the faces of "no." In all cases, no matter what students are denying or which language group they belonged, appeared the same expressions, in the same order: the joints of angry eyebrows, wrinkled chin disgust and contempt tight lips. The computer also analyzed the time it took for each of these expressions appear and combine to form the face of "no." The conclusion was that the four language groups, this time is the same - and very close to the one that leads us to express something in words or gestures.

Negative expressions were chosen as the object of study of researchers from Ohio to be evolutionarily important: Charles Darwin believed that the ability to communicate danger or aggression was one of the keys of human evolution, and that it developed long before our ability to speak - then comes the face of the universal "no".

The next step is to increase the sample program expressions so that in the future, scientists can analyze any guy. The idea is to use the YouTube videos that next stage, cataloging at least 1,000 hours of people talking (which corresponds to 100 million frames) and later reaches 10 thousand hours of videos (or 1 billion frames). The aim is to investigate whether other expressions are so common and important when the face of "no", including the positive and draw parallels between different languages.