Babies learn through copying. They experiment with copying sounds until they can form words and evetually sentences. Similarly, they copy facial expressions so that they can learn the subtleties of non-verbal emotional communication. This imitative behavior is exhibited primarily in humans and other apes, but also in certain types of monkeys. According to sources I found online about this, the high degree of facial mimicry in human babies tends to drop off as a behavior after a “several” months of age “as infants become emotionally tuned to their mothers.”

If this behavior does diminish after a certain age, then that likely means that the range of facial expressions most people make tends to become fixed at a fairly early age. I’ve seen information online which suggests that there are about eight or so close to universally-accepted types of facial expression & emotional state pairings which crop up again and again in experimental studies.

Obviously, emotional states can be much more nuanced than that, but it is an interesting starting point for further experimentation. One way to experiment with this is simply to click on the link above, make each of the faces depicted, and attempt to “feel” the emotional state typically paired with that expression. To get the most out of it, make sure that you overdo it. Really exaggerate the facial expression so that you can (potentially) access the corresponding emotional state more deeply.

Or try out copying the faces made by the girl in this video:

With the exception of bored teenagers posing for YouTube videos, most of us do not spend a great deal of time actively experimenting with making new facial expressions. Most of these physical habits are set at an early age. Which I have been hypothesizing means that the corresponding emotional states which accompany the physical expressions are also set at an early age. What this may mean is that, emotionally, most of us are still acting as infants, or at least as small children. We hardly need to take this hypothesis into a lab to find evidence that this is in fact the case.

So my question has become: can we re-train our emotional responses by actively working on our facial and physical expressions? That is, if we create new physical habits, can we re-key what lies beneath them emotionally?

It seems that this sort of thing is the essence of acting: learning to more effectively emote based on facial, physical and auditory expression. One of the keys to doing this in method acting seems to be sense memory (proprioceptive awareness of sensation!), that is calling to mind specific sensory memories and thereby bringing forth the body’s natural responses to them to create an aura of authenticity within the acting. This partly hinges as well upon the fact that most of our most vivid memories are tied to extreme emotional states.

One practical application of all this then is simply to spend time every day actively mimicking facial expressions. You can do this with other people around you (though they may be all like, WTF?) or you can also try it with movies, since actors working within the sequence of a story tend to portray a much greater range of physical expression. Don’t limit your copying either just to facial expressions. Try standing up and getting fully into the poses of the actors (see also: movieoke). Try copying their speech patterns and their tonality. What I have found with this (and I have not done it more than a handful of times) is that your range of physical expressiveness expands very dramatically very quickly. Especially when done in conjunction with other left-right and body-mind integration exercises as outlined elsewhere on this site.

As your emotional intelligence increases through these simple techniques, you are also likely to notice that other people’s emotional responses to you also change dramatically. You may find that you become more engaging or a better story-teller, and that people tend to pay closer attention to what you are saying: all simply because you are more effectively emoting, and you are breaking down old habitual patterns of emotional experience and expression. The reason you become more engaging to other people is mirror neurons: parts of the brain that light up whether we are experiencing something ourselves, or watching someone else experience them. To be a better actor then is to feel more deeply the emotional states you are in, and express them more effectively so that other people can feel them more deeply as well.

Would love to hear other people’s results who try these experiments out, as well as how they correlate to those of people who have done any acting on stage or otherwise (as I myself have not). Anyway, I hope to begin putting together more practical exercises like this which anybody can do to improve the quality of experiencing day to day life.