The Body Language of FEAR!
Key Concept: For fine artists, cartoonists and animators to clearly and unambiguously depict Fear, it is essential to include a protective body stance in concert with a contorted face. |
Figure 1. Terror engages one's whole being, as illustrated by the faces & body poses of these haunted house visitors.
Fear on the face is challenging, in a way the other Cardinal expressions -- Joy, Anger, Disgust, Surprise, and Sadness -- are not. Not just because it is associated with the most toxic and undesirable of all the emotions, but also because, from an artistic point of view, it is by far the most difficult to pose.
Over years of doing online tests of facial expression, our research team was able to find optimal versions (90% + viewer agreement) of nearly all the emotions. It’s relatively easy to get virtually unanimous agreement about Happy or Sad faces, for example, and Anger is not far behind.
But, Fear has always been a different story, and not just with our research group – other researchers have reported similar issues achieving high recognition rates. As hard as we might try, recognition in the low 80% range was often the best we could achieve, and worse results were distressingly common. Was it the shape and width of the eye opening? The tilting of the brows? Or, the details of the mouth? (These are the three main components of Fear on the face.)
Over years of doing online tests of facial expression, our research team was able to find optimal versions (90% + viewer agreement) of nearly all the emotions. It’s relatively easy to get virtually unanimous agreement about Happy or Sad faces, for example, and Anger is not far behind.
But, Fear has always been a different story, and not just with our research group – other researchers have reported similar issues achieving high recognition rates. As hard as we might try, recognition in the low 80% range was often the best we could achieve, and worse results were distressingly common. Was it the shape and width of the eye opening? The tilting of the brows? Or, the details of the mouth? (These are the three main components of Fear on the face.)
   | The purpose of this blog is to report a recent discovery: Fear is exceptional in another way. It’s always been my goal to see how much information can be conveyed by the face alone. Quite a lot, it turns out, as our results with most of the Cardinals confirm. Our thousands of tests have been done using the image of the head without any indication of the body. While this is enough for 5 out of the 6 Cardinals, it now seems obvious that we require more information to be clear about frightened faces, specifically enough body language to demonstrate that a strong defensive gesture accompanies what’s happening on the face. WELCOME TO NIGHTMARES FEAR FACTORY! To come to this conclusion, I went to the most authoritative source I know, the hundreds of photographs of terrified people taken by a hidden camera at the Canadian haunted house, “Nightmares Fear Factory.” Scanning page after page of these pictures, it became obvious that protective body language is an inseparable component of extreme Fear, present in virtually every case. It’s not hard to find people who look Angry, Sad, or Happy without a strong echo in their posture (although, of course, it does often occur), but it seems almost impossible to find people responding to an extreme and sudden threat who are not throwing their hands up into the air, grabbing a companion, or defensively crouching. |
Figure 2, 3 & 4. You can almost hear the shrieks of terror as these groups of friends recoil from an unknown menace in a haunted house. With wide-open mouths, stretched lips, popping eye balls, contorted eye brows AND defensive body language, you have the visual components of truly terrified folks.
FEAR FACTOR!
When I began testing this theory online, the results were clear. Every face I tested registered improved recognition if the image of the frightened face also included expressive hands and arms. If the face had a high recognition rate to begin with, the improvement was nearly always between 10% and 20%. Poorly recognized faces (with a high Surprise score), improved much more dramatically.
In Figures 5/6 and 7/8 below, I show two examples of an effective Face of Fear being made more reconizable with more visual context:
When I began testing this theory online, the results were clear. Every face I tested registered improved recognition if the image of the frightened face also included expressive hands and arms. If the face had a high recognition rate to begin with, the improvement was nearly always between 10% and 20%. Poorly recognized faces (with a high Surprise score), improved much more dramatically.
In Figures 5/6 and 7/8 below, I show two examples of an effective Face of Fear being made more reconizable with more visual context:
Figure 5. (left) A convincing Face of Fear with no context gets an 84% positive response from a random group of survey participants. Figure 6. (right) The same convincing Face of Fear with defensive body language added, gets a 98% positive response from a different random group of survey participants.
Based on Figure 5, I hit the ceiling for a well-posed, but still slightly ambiguous, Fear face at 84%. Good, but not great. Don’t ask me to explain why several folks though she looked Angry – with Fear, a certain number of people seem to get a bit confused. They know it’s not neutral, but they are not quite clear what emotion is in progress. [Surprise tends to be the most common mis-identification – an expression which shares the wide eyes and open mouth.]
In Figure 6, I kept the same face and added a very sketchy version of a pose with a protective gesture, and lo and behold, everyone - except for one Surprise holdout - saw her as frightened. Big change! And one of my highest Fear scores in history.
Not surprisingly, other tests returned similar results:
In Figure 6, I kept the same face and added a very sketchy version of a pose with a protective gesture, and lo and behold, everyone - except for one Surprise holdout - saw her as frightened. Big change! And one of my highest Fear scores in history.
Not surprisingly, other tests returned similar results:
Figure 7. (left) Another convincing Face of Fear without any context, gets an acceptable positive response at 84%. Figure 8 (right) The same Face of Fear, with defensive arms added, gets close to a perfect score.
ARTISTS LISTEN UP!
The Fear Factory face in Figure 9 was seen by most people as Surprised when the body was cropped out. In Figure 10, with the protective stance visible, Surprise dropped by more than half, and Fear doubled. Body language can push an effective Fear face over the top, as illustrated above, and can even more dramatically improve the recognition rate of a much more ambiguous face, as here shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9. (left) Survey participants responded to the face of this haunted house visitor with a much higher score for "Surprise" than "Fear;" Figure 10. (right) With the protective stance included, double the number of survey participants recognized his contorted face as expressing Fear.
We humans have multiple ways to convey our feelings. Facial expression, body language, tone of voice, and our words themselves are all powerful tools to share our emotions with others. Faces alone can effectively and unambiguously communicate the Cardinal expressions of Joy, Sorrow, Anger, Surprise, and Disgust. Fear is the exception.
POST SCRIPT:
To read more about the facial characteristics of the “Face of Terror,” go to my previous blog post on May 2017.
CREDITS:
All photographic material (Figures 1-4 , 9 &10) provided by Nightmares Fear Factory, Niagara Falls, Canada which publishes a site with the best of photos of terrified haunted house visitors each month;
All drawings (Figures 5 - 8) created by the author digitally on a Wacom tablet.
To read more about the facial characteristics of the “Face of Terror,” go to my previous blog post on May 2017.
CREDITS:
All photographic material (Figures 1-4 , 9 &10) provided by Nightmares Fear Factory, Niagara Falls, Canada which publishes a site with the best of photos of terrified haunted house visitors each month;
All drawings (Figures 5 - 8) created by the author digitally on a Wacom tablet.
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