Chances are, you’re not very good at faking a smile. You can raise the corners of your lips into a neat grin—as one does for the camera—and you can probably tighten your eyelids a bit to enhance the effect. But unless you’re amused, excited, grateful, relieved, or just plain happy, you probably can’t pull your cheeks up and your eyebrows down to form a smile that looks genuine. No more than one in 10 people can voluntarily control the outer orbicularis oculi, the muscles surrounding the eye sockets, with that much precision.
Paul Ekman has spent 40 years watching thousands of people try. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco, Ekman is a world authority on facial expressions. He is also extraordinarily skilled at faking them. In the course of cataloging more than 10,000 human expressions, he has taught himself to flex each of his 43 facial muscles individually. He can even wiggle his ears one at a time. “If only they had an Olympic event for facial athletes,” he says.
Ekman may never win a gold medal, but he has no shortage of admirers. In recent years, as the war on terrorism has escalated, he and his colleagues have taught hundreds of police officers, judges, airport security officers, and FBI and CIA agents to size up their suspects and to read clues in their facial expressions. He is now an adviser for the Department of Defense, which is developing computer technology that can scan and analyze facial movements on videotape.
