Page 70 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

2.

To test this idea about the transparency of Friends, I contacted a psychologist named Jennifer
Fugate, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Fugate is an expert in FACS,
1
which stands for Facial Action Coding System. In FACS, every one of the forty-three distinctive
muscle movements in the face is assigned a number, called an “action unit.” People like Fugate who
are trained in FACS can then look at someone’s facial expressions and score them, just as a
musician can listen to a piece of music and translate it into a series of notes on the page.

So, for example, take a look at this photo:

That’s called a Pan-Am smile—the kind of smile a flight attendant gives you when he or she is
trying to be polite. When you give that kind of smile, you pull up the corners of your lips, using
what’s called the zygomaticus major muscle, but leave the rest of your face impassive. That’s why
the smile looks fake: It’s a smile without any kind of facial elaboration. In the FACS, the Pan-Am
smile using the zygomaticus major is scored as AU 12.
Now take a look at this: