Popular Culture, Society, and the Science of the Face
As Cicero famously wrote, “The face is the image of the soul, and the eyes its betrayers” (imago animi vultus, indices oculi). In De Oratore (Book III), he argues that the face naturally reflects a person’s emotions and state of mind, so words alone are not enough to persuade an audience unless they are accompanied by appropriate facial expressions and gestures. The same intuition appears in other texts. Referring to conscience, the Book of Sirach (13:25–26) states: “A cheerful face is a sign of a good heart, but to devise proverbs requires painful thinking.” Across cultures and centuries, people have shared the belief that our faces reveal something about what is happening within us.
Today, these observations from classical authors, philosophers, and popular wisdom are supported by neuroscience. Charles Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), documented the connection between inner emotional states and facial expressions. Subsequent research has shown that emotions are processed in the limbic system—with the amygdala playing a central role—and translated into facial expressions through the facial nerve, which controls the muscles of the face and eyes. At the same time, signals from the body’s internal organs, such as the heart and digestive system, travel to the brain via the vagus nerve and interoceptive pathways, contributing to our emotional experience. This is the foundation of Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis (1994).
However, the meaning we assign to these bodily signals is not determined by biology alone. The same physiological state can be experienced as different emotions depending on its social and cultural context and on how it is interpreted, an idea reflected in Eric Kandel’s Principles of Neural Science (2001). Lisa Feldman Barrett further develops this perspective in How Emotions Are Made (2017), arguing that culture and socialization play a decisive role in shaping emotional meaning. Through social interaction, we learn, for example, to interpret the same physical stimulus—a pinch—as playful and comforting when it comes from a parent, but as threatening and disturbing when it comes from a stranger in an entirely different context, such as on public transport.
In the dialogic societies in which we increasingly live (Ramon Flecha, The Dialogic Society; Sari Hanafi, Against Symbolic Liberalism), engaging in dialogue and reaching agreements with people who hold different worldviews—and therefore different emotional frameworks—has become both more common and more necessary. A hug from a stranger, for instance, may be experienced as a gesture of hospitality and warmth, or as an invasion of personal space that causes discomfort or distress. Often, people enter a conversation already carrying emotional baggage, and these emotions are reflected on their faces long before a single word is spoken. In turn, these facial signals shape the expectations of the other person, predisposing them either toward calm dialogue or toward confrontation.
Perhaps aware that emotionally charged arguments rarely lead to constructive outcomes, Chinese culture places great importance on the concept of “face” (lian). People are taught never to lose face during a conversation or disagreement. A close Western equivalent would be maintaining one’s composure and good manners. This is a wise principle, especially when we consider that our understanding of a situation may be mistaken—or, at the very least, incomplete—until it is contrasted with someone else’s perspective.
As the works of Jürgen Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action), Jon Elster (Deliberative Democracy), and Ramon Flecha (The Dialogic Society) suggest, two people may enter a conversation holding particular opinions and emotional states, yet the dialogue itself can transform both. This insight is also reflected in qualitative social science research methods. Interviewing manuals consistently recommend that researchers pay close attention to their facial expressions and non-verbal communication, as participants tend to relax and share more openly when the interviewer conveys attentiveness, kindness, and trustworthiness through their face and demeanor (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2008).
This leads to another important idea: for dialogue to avoid escalating into conflict or violence, certain conditions must already be in place—education, mutual respect, caution, attentive listening, and shared values. But that is a topic for another article.
