Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett: How to Understand Emotions

The way that people move their faces in moments of expression is highly variable ... People scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry, which is more than chance ... But that means 65% of the time, people are moving their faces in other meaningful ways that's not scowling.

In our culture, people believe that they can read mental states of other people by their face, and they believe it so much that it's enshrined in the legal system. And there are people who lose their lives because juries believe that they can read remorse or the lack of it.

It's often the case, I think, in my experience in the science of emotion, but elsewhere too, that scientists in their efforts to make their work meaningful to people will try to interpret their findings in ways that the average person would find interesting.

I was the only one in this group of the five of us who my starting hypothesis was that facial movements are meaningful but there's no one-to-one correspondence between a particular facial configuration, like a scowl, and anger.

Being wrong is—no one likes to be wrong—but for scientists to admit they're wrong is hard, and it's something that we should encourage each other to do, I think, more publicly.

Half of this scowls that people make are not related to anger.

Scientists identify biological signals by what we believe them to mean psychologically. So, 'serotonin is a happiness chemical.' No, serotonin evolved as a metabolic regulator. It is a metabolic regulator.