Unmasking The Face by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen is about faces and feelings. They show the blueprints, of a volunteer named Patricia, of what facial expressions for specific emotions look like. They explain the key aspects of what you should look for to discover the emotion the person is showing. Many mistakes are made when trying to read the face. Faces show many signals for one message and often times the expressions last only a few seconds. When trying to identify the emotion, you may look at the wrong signal. Ekman and Friesen explain different experiments they did to discover the key facial expressions for surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, and sadness. The theme of this book is that knowledge of facial expressions can …show more content…
Surprise is the shortest-lived emotion. It only lasts a few seconds. If you have to think about whether or not you’re surprised, then you aren’t surprised at all. Many different things, such as an unexpected party thrown just for you, can show surprise. Ekman and Friesen explained how if surprise lasts longer than a few seconds, it is no longer surprise. Once you believe it is still lingering, you are actually processing the event and deciding how you feel about it. It casts doubt on what happened and can either make you happy or lead you to a state of shock. Times that I thought I was still surprised, I really wasn’t and I find that to be very interesting. Surprise is shown in your face when the eyebrows are arched causing the forehead to wrinkle up, jaw drops open, and eyes grow wider. This book taught me how to better understand facial expressions. Even though most facial expressions are micro-expressions, they come and go very fast, I found myself examining my family and friends expressions. People used to say you can tell a lot about a person by looking in their eyes, but you actually need to look at all aspects of their face from their forehead down to their chin. Having the knowledge of facial expressions helps you identify when people are lying to