I was listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning, hoping they would have a story about the upcoming Wisconsin Primary to be held on Tuesday, April 5th. Trump is facing a stiff challenge there from Ted Cruz, in what is likely to be a critical swing state for this presidential election.
Instead, I heard a wonderful report on some innovative neurocognitive research by Ohio State University (OSU) professor Aleix Martinez about “the one negative facial expression that crosses cultures and languages globally.” He described fascinating work which led his team to discover a universal human expression they have named the Not Face.
MARTIN (NPR): What are the kinds of things that could elicit the Not Face?
MARTINEZ: Anything that you disagree with, especially if you disagree with me very strongly, or if you just want to tell me, no way. There is no way I’m going to do this, there’s no way I agree – you would produce a Not Face.
From the Ohio State University News Room (March 28,2016)
Researchers have identified a single, universal facial expression that is interpreted across many cultures as the embodiment of negative emotion.
The look proved identical for native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language (ASL).
It consists of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and raised chin, and because we make it when we convey negative sentiments, such as “I do not agree,” researchers are calling it the “not face.”
For this new study, the researchers hypothesized that if a universal “not face” existed, it was likely to be combination of three basic facial expressions that are universally accepted to indicate moral disagreement: anger, disgust and contempt.
A “not face” emerged: the furrowed brows of “anger” combined with the raised chin of “disgust” and the pressed-together lips of “contempt.” Regardless of language—and regardless of whether they were speaking or signing—the participants’ faces displayed these same three muscle movements when they communicated negative sentences.
The OSU researchers have just published a scientific paper in the journal Cognition, and have received good notices in scientific and general media in the last week.*
The Not Face boils down to the combination of three facial expressions: furrowed brows (anger), an elevated chin (disgust), and compressed lips (contempt). The face is present in native English speakers, Spanish speakers, and Mandarin speakers. It registers across racial and ethnic lines. It is even expressly found in users of American Sign Language and follows their signing patterns.
Humans have an amazing inborn capacity to make and recognize micro-facial expressions in literally an instant. That skill is part of the basis for being able to pick a family member or friend out of a crowd with just a fleeting glance. It is part of how we make snap judgments during conversation. It is a part of our automatic emotional early warning and danger detection system.
We can be wrong sometimes, but we all use these facial reading skills dozens of times every day for both large and small decisions. We try to get it right, and we can improve our accuracy with conscious practice.
What The Researchers Did
To test their hypothesis, the scientists sat 158 Ohio State students in front of a digital camera. The students were filmed and photographed as they had a casual conversation with the person behind the camera in their native language.
The students belonged to four groups, which were chosen to represent a wide variety of grammatical structures. English is a Germanic language, while Spanish is based on Latin; Mandarin Chinese is a modern form of Middle Chinese that was formalized early in the 20th century. Like other forms of sign language, ASL combines hand gestures, head and body movements and facial expressions to communicate individual words or phrases.
If the grammatical marker of negation is universal, the researchers reasoned, then all the study participants would make similar facial expressions when using that grammatical marker, regardless of which language they were speaking or signing. They should all make the same “not face” in conjunction with—or in lieu of—the spoken or signed marker of negation.
The Not Face is a plausible scientific hypothesis. The OSU research was based on a detailed frame by frame analysis of 158 research subjects videotaped under controlled experimental conditions. The researchers intend to expand their research database to verify their results in ever larger groups of people.
Manual analysis of the facial expressions was painstaking, Martinez admitted, but now that he and his team have shown that the experiment works, they hope to make the next phase of the project fully automatic, with new algorithms that will extract and analyze facial movements without human help. They’re building those algorithms now.
Once they finish, they will take a “big data” approach to further explore the origins of language. First, they’ll analyze 1,000 hours of YouTube video of people talking, which corresponds to around 100 million still frames. Ultimately, they want to amass 10,000 hours of data, or 1 billion frames.
They are talking about 10,000 people. This will require significant time and monetary resources to complete.
Trump is Not Kind to Science in General
Trump is not known for his grasp of science policy or scientific methods, nor for his contribution to science by other means.
He is dodgy on matters of climate change, childhood vaccine schedules, funding of space exploration, environmental protection, and nuclear waste disposal and proliferation, among other science policy issues. He has no apparent understanding of the biological consequences of an uncontrolled nuclear release nor the three essential components of our national security nuclear triad.
There is no Trump Medical School with his name on a building. No Trump Vaccination program to aid poor children worldwide. No Trump Program to Cure Malaria. There is no Trump Science building at an accredited University to house a college Computer Science Department. There is not even a Trump Kinesiology Program to study Golf Mechanics anywhere.
Of course, Trump is not qualified to do any scientific work himself, given his lack of training and experience. But as an American Top-200 billionaire worth, by his own reckoning, $8 billion dollars (at age 69), he could easily fund each or even all of these initiatives, without breaking a financial sweat. He could be charitable and generous like fellow American billionaires like Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett, or Michael Bloomberg, or even Mark Zuckerberg. The average American making $40,000 donates 3% of his yearly income to charitable causes.
An Alternate Science Proposal for Donald Trump
But Trump may contribute to advancing the exciting Not Face research without spending a dime of his own money.
May Heaven bless the huge Google Search Engine resource. A quick Google search under images for the term “Trump” yields so many hits, the photo galleries are divided into 41 different categories, for Donald alone and with other people.
For example from Google (accessed April 3, 2016):
Search Term Hits
Donald Trump 183 million
Trump Face 97 million
Trump Frown 318 thousand
Trump Pointing 646 thousand
Trump Question 51.4 million
A comparable simple search on YouTube (accessed April 3, 2016) showed similar spectacular results:
Search Term Hits
Trump 4.2 million
Trump Megan 286 thousand
Trump Debates 1.2 million
Trump Rallies 437 thousand
This vast and rapidly growing research database of Trump’s facial images is freely available to anyone with a computer and some patience. The OSU team could use him as an intensive single subject project to complement their proposed study of many people for short periods (1,000 for 1 hour each, or 2,000 for 30 minutes each, etc.).
Further, there are so many images and videos of Trump available for no charge, the experimenters could easily vary the experimental circumstances in ways they never could for most subjects. They could compare Trump to himself in different states or cities, at different times of day, before various size groups (one on one, small groups of 10 or 15, town halls with several hundreds, or mass rallies), in different venues (intimate, formal speeches, TV studios, visits to plants and factories, sports events, selling merchandise, meeting with business or religious leaders). This chance for experimental variety is a powerful tool scientists use to strengthen the general power of their scientific theories in real life.
They could also crowd source parts of the work, as is done for the Seti project. Jane Wakefield of BBC recounted an initiative by the Seti Institute project in 2012:
A website has been launched that aims to get the public involved in the search for extraterrestrial life. Announced at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Los Angeles, the site will stream radio frequencies that are transmitted from the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Allen Telescope Array.
Participants will be asked to search for signs of unusual activity. It is hoped the human brain can find things the automated system might miss. The website is the latest stage in a quest “to empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”.
The project is being run by Dr. Jillian Tarter, winner of the TED Prize in 2009 and director of the Seti Institute’s Center for Seti Research.
Not Face Examples for Donald Trump
The OSU scientists have shown that the Not Face expression applies to English speaking Caucasians, as well as minority groups and ethnics. If so, then Donald Trump should be an excellent research subject given his enormous media exposure. A possible confirming experiment springs to mind.
Obvious candidates against whom he might display his anger, disgust, and contempt would be strong women. Take Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Sure enough, video screen captures seem to support the OSU cognitive theory.
Megyn Kelly (1) questioning Trump on his disparaging Comments about women, First Republican Debate, August 6, 2015.
Megyn Kelly (2) questioning Trump on “When did you become a Republican?”, First Republican Debate, August 6, 2015.
Megyn Kelly questioning Trump on multiple flip flops, Fox News Republican Debate, January 28, 2016.
Trump is also contemptuous of men who question and press him on issues. Take Chris Matthews at last week’s CNN Town Hall (March 30, 2016) and the abortion segment.
Trump doesn’t only distain reporters, he often doesn’t like tough questions from an audience either. See his response to a voter in New Hampshire asking about equal pay for women.
Here is a screen capture from the Google search for all Donald Trump images described above. Two of the first five results (#3 and #5) exhibit the Not Face.
Of course, an initial sample of just six instances is not ironclad proof for a scientific theory. But there is enough substance here to warrant a more careful search. I hope the Ohio State Team takes up this challenge.
Others have written about Trump’s grimaces, scowls, smirks, and angry faces, though not from the perspective of cognitive science analysis. Here for example is a New Yorker piece by David Denby (August 12, 2015) titled “The Three Faces of Trump.” This is Denby’s description of Trump’s first face which he calls “Implacable Resolution”. He adopts a more psychological approach.
The increasingly familiar chin-up, narrow-eyed Mussolini frown. When Trump listens to a hostile question, his lips are closed, his head squares up to a solid block of orange clay, his corn-silk hair surges resolutely forward and backward at the same time. Expressionless, he nods as the hostile sentence is delivered. By evoking Mussolini’s thrusting chin, I don’t mean to imply that Trump is eager to become a military dictator. He isn’t. Donald Trump is something classically American, an unwavering what’s-in-it-for-me capitalist who likes to crush other people. Yet Mussolini and Trump share something: They appeal to an appreciation, even love, of overwhelming ego strength and extreme machismo, however crass in expression—in fact, the crasser and more preposterous the better (shame doesn’t exist for some public men). Those who are drawn to such strength nestle under it. The hero releases his aggression on the world, the aggression that others would be punished for; his ability to get away with belligerence, insults, lies, and threats makes it easier for his audience to accept caution and silence for themselves. He has triumphed for them, and that’s more than enough.
A Better Idea: Trump Not Face Game
But then an even better idea than making Trump an OSU subject struck. We have already been treated to a Trump-themed board game, reinvigorated for a brief time when The Apprentice became a reality TV hit show 12 years ago.
What if we make a new game for the digital age called:
The Trump Not Face Game (Gold Edition)
The rules are simple:
#1. Go to Google Images or YouTube
#2 Enter a search by typing Trump with a modifying word or phrase, like face, or frown, or speech, or pointing in the search box
#3. Click on the image or video results one-by-one to observe and determine if Trump Is making the Not Face.
#4. Each player should have no more than 45 seconds to pick an image to score for that turn. No image may be used more than once.
#5. The player will review the image circumstances to see if Trump is expressing the classical triad of anger, disgust, and contempt (ADC).
#6. A neutral player or consensus vote will rate each image with an integer score from 0 to3 (from not present to all three)
This game can be played alone, with friends, or online. Player turns would alternate. The flip of a coin is used to determine who will be the first player. The search phrase should be agreed upon by all players to start the contest. I would suggest the first one to 21 points wins a game.
For extended play, three games would make a set. Best of five sets wins a match. Bets should not be made for more than a nickel a point, to keep the game friendly. The game might be played out over drinks and snacks, as long as no one has to drive home afterwards, if alcohol is involved.
This game could be way more fun than Angry Birds, or Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
An even more subtle and complex version of the game would be to score only Not Face expressions of the viewers at a Trump performance, after he makes a derogatory remark about a person, place, thing, or group.
America deserves to be richly entertained during the political season. Donald Trump, the Trump Campaign, and/or The Trump Organization are most welcome to trademark this game idea. Maybe they can even figure out how to monetize the concept like their baseball caps and dog sweaters merchandise.
Until that day, everyday TV viewers and internet users can play for free. In the meantime, interested citizens and voters across America can perform their own, homespun analysis to validate the No Face theory to their political satisfaction. This would be especially valuable for traditional conservatives, independents, and skeptical Republicans. Science tells us that die-hard Trump supporters don’t care what the facts are, so their own original research likely wouldn’t matter much. Trump has already triumphed for them.
For those more interested in cognitive science research, or technically minded readers, please consult the following selected references, including the original published scientific paper, just below:
Benitez-Quiroza CF, RB Wilbarth, and AM Martinez, The not face: A grammaticalization of facial expressions of emotion. Cognition, vol. 150:77-84, May 2016
Medical Daily Mach 30, 2016
Medical News Today, March 30,2016
Discover March 28, 2016
Science Alert, March 29,2016
Sci-News.com, March 28,2016
Quartz March 30, 2016