Facial Expressions Quotes

Tears had poured from her eyes without any change in her facial expression. It’s pure pain and pure surrender when your soul cries without any fight from your body and that’s how I knew she was deeply affected.

The thing about talking swords…it’s hard to tell when they’re kidding. They have no facial expressions. Or faces.

Desperate times call for desperate measures" is an aphorism which here means "sometimes you need to change your facial expression in order to create a workable disguise." The quoting of an aphorism, such as "It takes a village to raise a child," "No news is good news," and "Love conquers all," rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen, which is why we provide our volunteers with a disguise kit in addition to helpful phrases of advice.

He even listened to more than her sounds, because Tiger Lily was a girl of few words. He listened with his eyes, watched her facial expressions, judged body language, and therefore read Tiger Lily better than anyone else.

people's emotions are rarely put into words , far more often they are expressed through other cues. the key to intuiting another's feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels , tone of voice , gesture , facial expression and the like

Does he not realize that facial expressions are supposed to accompany speech?

He used his large shoulders and movements to impose his dominance over others as he strutted around but his facial expressions were a giveaway to people like Maeve who was born into a gritty group of native born fighting Irish. While many saw him as a man who worked his way up to power and influence and attained success that others fail to achieve, she saw him as a sham. He didn’t acquire loyalty by goodwill, but by corruption, fear, and loathing.

But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.

Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.

However, I could no longer rely on genuine emotion to generate facial expressions, and when you have to spend every social interaction consciously manipulating your face into shapes that are only approximately the right ones, alienating people is inevitable.

Of all facial expressions, which is the worst to have aimed at you? Wouldn't you agree it's disgust?

At the same time believers realise that the defects they see in one another are tests from Allah. For this reason they don't call attention to these defects, but compensate for them by acting positively. They carefully avoid the slightest action, facial expression or word that would suggest ridicule

Most of the people you see going to work today are LARPing (live-action role playing) an incredibly boring RPG (role-playing game) called "professionalism" that requires them to alter their vocabulary, posture, eating habits, facial expressions--every detail all the way down to what they allow themselves to find funny.

In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone, and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words.

I wonder what it's like to be him. To vocalize the stupid thoughts he has without considering how others will interpret them. He just fumbles happily throughout his day, saying whatever he is compelled to - while I am over here laboring to produce appeasing facial expressions.

In the hours that followed, I learned that Ademic hand gestures did not actually represent facial expressions. It was nothing so simple as that. For example a smile can mean you're amused, happy, grateful, or satisfied. You can smile to comfort someone. You can smile because you're content or because you're in love. A grimace or a grin look similar to a smile, but they mean entirely different things. Imagine trying to teach someone how to smile. Imagine trying to describe what different smiles mean and when, precisely, to use them in conversation. It's harder than learning to walk.

Dads. It’s time to tell our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to show our kids that we love them. Constantly. It’s time to take joy in their twenty-thousand daily questions and their inability to do things as quickly as we’d like. It’s time to take joy in their quirks and their ticks. It’s time to take joy in their facial expressions and their mispronounced words. It’s time to take joy in everything that our kids are.

you begin to talk like me your facial expressions like my own this is when i knew you were mine

Smiles are probably the most underrated facial expressions, much more complicated than most people realize. There are dozens of smiles, each differing in appearance and in the message expressed.

There is a characteristic INTJ expression which has become popularly termed "the death glare." This facial expression is actually not a glare, but the INTJ's neutral face.

At the same time believers realise that the defects they see in one another are tests from Allah. For this reason they don't call attention to these defects, but compensate for them by acting positively. They carefully avoid the slightest action, facial expression or word that would suggest ridicule.

The micro facial expression of contempt when engaging leaders about preparing for their organisation's change is often the norm, matched only by their leadership of change knowledge

The only one who didn't know was George Lucas. We kept it from him, because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression--and he fooled us even then. He got Industrial Light and Magic to change his facial expressions for him and THX sound to make the noise of a face-changing expression.

What would happen if a man's face could adequately express his suffering, if his entire inner agony would be objectified in his facial expression? Could we still communicate? Wouldn't we then cover our faces with our hands while talking? Life would really be impossible if the infinitude of feelings we harbor within ourselves would be fully expressed in the lines of our face. Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would be truly understand and appreciate the advantages of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering!

I changed my mind.” “You changed—” “My. Mind.” I stopped short and faced him, placing my hands on my hips. “It’s like underpants, Jethro.” “Dirty and dark?” He smirked. “No.” I scowled at his facial expression. “A mind is like underpants because people change them all the time.” “But you don’t.” “I do change my underpants all the time, Jethro. And, for the record, I think it’s mighty rude of you to assume I don’t.” He almost rolled his eyes, but caught the urge. “I meant your mind, Cletus. You don’t change your mind.

Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they are thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there- and all the time they’ll get there any way, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end

In the past few months, all these public exchanges, all the countless social dealings that made up the fabric of the day, had come to seem incredibly difficult. I tried desperately to fit in, but for the most part I was only physically present, attempting to match my facial expressions to the people around me while my mind drifted back to Emma in her hospital room.

Few realize how loud their expressions really are. Be kind with what you wordlessly say.

whether we realize it or not, we automatically copy the facial expressions we see.

I wish people would follow the Facial Expressions Chart like they’re supposed to.

Consider that the simplest social interactions between two people requires performing an astonishing array of tasks: interpreting what the other person is saying; reading body language and facial expressions; smoothly taking turns talking and listening; responding to what the other person said; assessing whether you're being understood; determining whether you're well received, and, if not, figuring out how to improve or remove yourself from the situation. Think of what it takes to juggle all this at once! And that's just a one-to-one conversation. Now imagine the multitasking required in a group setting like a dinner party. (p237)

Sign is a live, contemporaneous, visual-gestural language and consists of hand shapes, hand positioning, facial expressions, and body movements. Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body.

It is estimated that humans are capable of more than ten thousand different facial expressions (Ekman, 2003, 14–15).

She would make facial expressions as though she were having conversations with people in her head.They seemed to turn into debates more often than not,judging by the activity on her forehead...It was almost the conversations in her head were loud enough to fill her silence.

The syntax of prejudice—threaded into conversation with the perfect pauses and facial expressions—was like ciphers and spy codes. The meaning clear to those it was meant for. To everyone else, it was harmless scribbles. Easy enough to deny.

Rosenfeld runs the metropolitan staff, the Post's largest, like a football coach. He prods his players, letting them know that he has promised the front office results, pleading, yelling, cajoling, pacing, working his facial expressions for instant effects - anger, satisfaction, concern. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward

as texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying.

Mother-infant inter-brain synchrony algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots are developed based on brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions and heart rhythms between mother and child.

One of the key algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence is Mother-Infant Inter-brain Synchrony algorithm, which mimics the brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions, touch and heart rhythms of mother and child.

The man raised his glass, 'To you!' Can't you think of a wittier toast?' Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl's game. Now sitting face to face with her, he realized it wasn't just the words which were turning her into a stranger, but that her whole persona had changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled that type of woman whom he knew so well and for whom he felt some aversion. And so (holding his glass in his raised hand), he corrected his toast: 'O.K., then I won't drink to you, but to your kind, in which are combined so successfully the better qualities of the animal and the worse aspects of the human being.

Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.

Not only do you lose a person to death, but you lose their noise too—their noise and smells, gestures and facial expressions. You lose the way they talk and phrase things and laugh, the way they fill in your blanks without ever thinking about it or having to try. You lose things you love about them they don’t even know they possess.

The other day I found her passport in her drawer when I was putting away my dad's laundered handkerchiefs. I wish I hadn't. For the purpose of my story, she should have it with her. I sat on my dad's bed and flipped through page after empty page. No stamps. No exotic locales. No travel-worn smudges or creases. Just the ID information and my mother's black-and-white photo which if it were used in a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions would be labelled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful.

Because the human experience involves loss, we need to feel it, express it, and then release it. Only then do we achieve healing.

Though she has trouble deciphering other people's facial expressions, her face is an open book and no one would ever have trouble understanding hers.

He was the kind of guy who had a unique facial expression dedicated to thinking.

The choices that women make sometimes seems provoking and at the same time amusing. I once met a lady who said she liked my amusing facial expression.

Looks like I'll be sucking your cock for food, but entirely my way." Vadim paused. "No. Food is free. I'll give you money so you can buy food." Dan's head hidden, lowered, Vadim couldn't see his facial expression. Surprise. Astonishment, his Russkie was more decent to him than he'd expected. Had hoped for a scrap to eat, but this treatment was more of a royal one. "You're treating me like I used to treat my pussies." Dan smirked, lifting his head. "You shaved their heads? You weird man." Vadim chuckled while Dan muttered one of his choice obscenities.

Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders.

If you (or any other mammal) bite into rancid food, the insular cortex lights up, causing you to spit it out, gag, feel nauseated, make a revolted facial expression—the insular cortex processes gustatory disgust. Ditto for disgusting smells.

We repeatedly found that one text can change the whole dynamic of a budding relationship. ... When I spoke with Sherry Turkle about this, she said that texting, unlike an in-person conversation, is not a forgiving medium for mistakes. In a face-to-face conversation, people can read each other’s body language, facial expressions, and tones of voice. If you say something wrong, you have the cues to sense it and you have a moment to recover or rephrase before it makes a lasting impact. Even on the phone you can hear a change in someone’s voice or a pause to let you know how they are interpreting what you’ve said. In text, your mistake just sits there marinating on the other person’s screen, leaving a lasting record of your ineptitude and bozoness.

Rarely do very handsome men allow their faces to run around without a leash. I am not very handsome, but I am above-average handsome, which means I have spent only one-sixteenth of my life in front of a mirror practicing facial expressions, as opposed to the maybe one-fourth that a very handsome guy might have. Yet I can tell you that if I had accidentally spilled coffee on a first date, I would have immediately made facial expression number 69b: Spilled Coffee on First Date face.

But when I catch my expression in my floor-length mirror, a dark scowl tightens my facial muscles. It's my normal look, unforturnately. I have RBF (resting bitch face). It's one-hundred percent real.

Though Simon imagined that Jace ran the gamut of facial expressions when he was alone with Clary, his default one around other people was a fierce sort of blankness. "He looks," Simon had once said to Isabelle, " like he's thinking about something deep and meaningful, but if you ask him what it is, he'll punch you in the face." "So don't ask him," Isabelle had said, as if she thought Simon was being ridiculous. "No one says you two need to be friends.

that was bad; i shouldn't have done that to prevent you from entering a catatonic state i am going to maintain a calm facial expression with crinkly eyes and an overall friendly demeanor i believe in a human being that is not upset i believe if you are working i should not be insane or upset--why am i ever insane or upset and not working? i vacuumed the entire house this morning i cleaned the kitchen and the computer room and i made you a meat helmet with computer paper the opportunity for change exists in each moment, all moments are alone and separate from other moments, and there are a limited number of moments and the idea of change is a delusion of positive or negative thinking your hands are covering your face and your body moves like a statue when i try to manipulate an appendage if i could just get you to cry tears of joy one more time

I don't mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking.

your love, your facial expression, your spirit and your words to the wise is my fervency: special for my mom and dad

His eyes travel me, too, and while I'm poor at reading facial expressions, I'm excellent at noticing when they shift.

Non-verbal behaviour, language, facial expression, intonations and gestures are instrumental in establishing complex contradictory, predominantly emotional relations between people and between man and the world. How frequently a touch by the shoulder, a handshake or a look tell more than can be expressed in a long monologue. Not because our speech is not accurate enough. Just the contrary. It is precisely its accuracy and definiteness that make speech unsuited for expressing what is too complex, changeful and ambiguous.

I call the polar opposites to Wrong Planet people Rag, Tag & Bobtail because they’re really nothing but glove puppets. Their heads are little more than hollow wood and at times they seem to be controlled by strings and rods and levers with invisible hands inside them making them ‘perform.’ Most glove puppets have fixed facial expressions and a hinged mouth, giving them a dull, lifeless expression.

Long looking with admiration produces change. From your heroes you pick up mannerisms and phrases and tones of voice and facial expressions and habits and demeanors and convictions and beliefs. The more admirable the hero is and the more intense your admiration is, the more profound will be your transformation. In the case of Jesus, he is infinitely admirable, and our admiration rises to the most absolute worship. Therefore, when we behold him as we should, the change is profound.

You're screwed when you start to notice the details, It's when you begin to notice the curve of his lips when he smiles. It's when you can't help but stare at him and the way he talks. It's when you get to admire the shape of his eyes and even the length of his brow. And even crazier, when you get to see the flash of his face in your mind on a random day or it's when you have his favorite facial expression stuck in your memory. . . And worse when you start to have it all in your mind, then you start to miss him.

I like bubbles in everything. I respect the power of silence. In cold or warm weather I favor a mug of hot cocoa. I admire cats―their autonomy, grace, and mystery. I awe at the fiery colors in a sunset. I believe in deity. I hear most often with my eyes, and I will trust a facial expression before any accompanying comment. I invent rules, words, adventures, and imaginary friends. I pretend something wonderful every day. I will never quit pretending.

Mom. And I can tell immediately by her body language and facial expression—upright posture, lifted chin, gritted teeth, widened eyes—that she’s not upset, she’s not angry, she’s livid. She’s about to blow. Oh no. There’s gotta be something I can do.

Cathy, don't look so defeated. She was only trying to put us down again. Maybe nothing did work out right for her, but that doesn't mean we are doomed. Let's go forth tomorrow with no great expectations of finding perfection. Then, expecting only a small share of happiness, we won't be disappointed.

The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the middle of the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel irresponsible, neglectful, or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do. For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how rotten you feel. This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or insisting that you get a job. You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be “depressed” or “troubled.” As a matter of fact, to your further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a person.

You may search my countenance, but you cannot read it.

Thus, the "memories" that people reported contained little information about the event they were trying to recall (the speaker's tone of voice) but were greatly influenced by the properties of the retrieval cue that we gave them (the positive or negative facial expression).

...when do I actually encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language', in the rel of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, a facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it.

The ripped open houses with their exposed arrangements, their laid bare secrets, are like portraits. Each one has its own individual facial expression. More identity is on display in the midst of the destruction. More intimacy. It makes her realise how vulnerable these achievements are. Identity. Intimacy.

Suddenly the look in Norah’s eyes changed. The nervous air she had walked in with, lifted from her face. Her eyes closed slightly and then opened wide, revealing pools of chocolate confidence. The change in her facial expression forced me to take a breath. How could you not love a creature like this — Angel by day, vixen by night.

Walking is nonverbal communication. Like I can tell if [she's] mad by her footsteps. Walking isn't as overt as other signals, like the way someone smells, their voice, their laugh, their facial expressions. Steps can be frivolous, but they're often distinct from person to person. Familiarity grows over time, slowly, inadvertently. I never tried to get to know her walk deliberately. This stuff happens unwittingly... Living with someone can't be simulated or rehearsed. It has to be experienced, in real time. There is no substitute for shared involvement, for creating actual memories. Like, I know how [she] blows her nose. I've never thought about it until now, but I do. I know the cadence, the rhythm. She does it in the same tempo every time. These observations - her footsteps, how she blows her nose - they're like little secrets.

After such prolonged frowning, it took her some moments to recall what her normal face even looked like, but after several attempts she was able to settle on a reasonable facsimile.

I was a prisoner inside my own body. I felt desperate, angry, stupid, confused, ashamed, hopeless and absolutely alone... and that this was of my own making. I could speak at home, how come I couldn't outside it? I have never been able to find the right words to describe what it was like. Imagine that for one day you are unable to speak to anyone you meet outside your own family, particularly at school/college, or out shopping, etc., have no sign language, no gestures, no facial expression. Then imagine that for eight years, but no one really understands. It was like torture, and I was the only person that knew it was happening. My body and face were frozen most of the time. I became hyperconscious of myself when outside the home and it was a relief to get back as I was always exhausted. I attempted to hide it (an impossible task) because I felt so ashamed that I couldn't do what other people seemed to find so natural and easy - to speak. At times I felt suicidal.

No matter how much madder it may make you, get out of bed forcing a smile. You may not smile because you are cheerful; but if you will force yourself to smile, you'll end up laughing. You will be cheerful because you smile. Repeated experiments prove that when we assume the facial expressions of a given mental mood - any given mood - then that mental mood itself will follow.

There isn’t a dance that can compare to the gaiety, the timing and cohesiveness of hand maneuvers, the provoca-tive movements in unison of an upbeat salsa dance. The sweating, the writhing bodies, the facial expressions; the start of a moderate sensual beat climaxing in the middle to a crescendo and then ending with a slower consummation is like making love in its most exquisite form.

The alley is a pitch for about twenty women leaning in doorways, chain-smoking. In their shiny open raincoats, short skirts, cheap boots, and high-heeled shoes they watch the street with hooded eyes, like spies in a B movie. Some are young and pretty, and some are older, and some of them are very old, with facial expressions ranging from sullen to wry. Most of the commerce is centred on the slightly older women, as if the majority of the clients prefer experience and worldliness. The younger, prettier girls seem to do the least business, apparent innocence being only a minority preference, much as it is for the aging crones in the alley who seem as if they’ve been standing there for a thousand years. In the dingy foyer of the hotel is an old poster from La Comédie Française, sadly peeling from the all behind the desk. Cyrano de Bergerac, it proclaims, a play by Edmond Rostand. I will stand for a few moments to take in its fading gaiety. It is a laughing portrait of a man with an enormous nose and a plumed hat. He is a tragic clown whose misfortune is his honour. He is a man entrusted with a secret; an eloquent and dazzling wit who, having successfully wooed a beautiful woman on behalf of a friend cannot reveal himself as the true author when his friend dies. He is a man who loves but is not loved, and the woman he loves but cannot reach is called Roxanne. That night I will go to my room and write a song about a girl. I will call her Roxanne. I will conjure her unpaid from the street below the hotel and cloak her in the romance and the sadness of Rostand’s play, and her creation will change my life.

Dogs have a facial muscle that can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive expression. This muscle doesn’t exist in wolves. It’s the result of centuries of domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit more like ours. Those faces are now easier to read, and better at triggering a nurturing response.

I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are to soft or downright liquid. I was seeing my shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest - your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor's, making love. Even your thoughts, since usually you express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed. Of course, there are such things as secret thoughts... but in general thoughts too are revealed. Shit, however, is not. Except for an extremely brief period of your life, when your mother is still changing your diapers, it is all yours. And since my shit at that moment must not have been all that different from what I had produced over the course of my past life, I was in that instant reuniting with my old, forgotten self, undergoing the first experience capable of merging with countless previous experiences, even those from when I did my business in the vineyards as a boy. Perhaps if I took a god look around, I would find the remains of those shits past, and then, triangulating properly, Clarabelle's treasure. But I stopped there. Shit was not my linden-blossom tea, of course not, how could I have expected to conduct my recherche with my sphincter? In order to rediscover lost time, one should have not diarrhea but asthma. Asthma is pneumatic, it is the breath (however labored) of the spirit: it is for the rich, who can afford cork-lined rooms. The poor, in the fields, attend less to spiritual than to bodily functions. And yet I felt not disinherited but content, and I mean truly content, in a way I had not felt since reawakening. The ways of the Lord are infinite, I said to myself, they go even through the butthole.

Micah knew the power of a look. When two people touched from across a distance, that touch could be frightening, wary, or a stroke of gentleness. He stroked her gently. He never let his eyes dip below her chin; rather, he let himself take in every nuance of expression, every shift of each facial motion, the flicker of her lashes, the shadows in her eyes, the tension in her small body. She was like a bird ready to fly. Poised at the edge of her seat, her body stiff and prepared to run.

Hypercritical, Shaming Parents Hypercritical and shaming parents send the same message to their children as perfectionistic parents do - that they are never good enough. Parents often deliberately shame their children into minding them without realizing the disruptive impact shame can have on a child's sense of self. Statements such as "You should be ashamed of yourself" or "Shame on you" are obvious examples. Yet these types of overtly shaming statements are actually easier for the child to defend against than are more subtle forms of shaming, such as contempt, humiliation, and public shaming. There are many ways that parents shame their children. These include belittling, blaming, contempt, humiliation, and disabling expectations. -BELITTLING. Comments such as "You're too old to want to be held" or "You're just a cry-baby" are horribly humiliating to a child. When a parent makes a negative comparison between his or her child and another, such as "Why can't you act like Jenny? See how she sits quietly while her mother is talking," it is not only humiliating but teaches a child to always compare himself or herself with peers and find himself or herself deficient by comparison. -BLAMING. When a child makes a mistake, such as breaking a vase while rough-housing, he or she needs to take responsibility. But many parents go way beyond teaching a lesson by blaming and berating the child: "You stupid idiot! Do you think money grows on trees? I don't have money to buy new vases!" The only thing this accomplishes is shaming the child to such an extent that he or she cannot find a way to walk away from the situation with his or her head held high. -CONTEMPT. Expressions of disgust or contempt communicate absolute rejection. The look of contempt (often a sneer or a raised upper lip), especially from someone who is significant to a child, can make him or her feel disgusting or offensive. When I was a child, my mother had an extremely negative attitude toward me. Much of the time she either looked at me with the kind of expectant expression that said, "What are you up to now?" or with a look of disapproval or disgust over what I had already done. These looks were extremely shaming to me, causing me to feel that there was something terribly wrong with me. -HUMILIATION. There are many ways a parent can humiliate a child, such as making him or her wear clothes that have become dirty. But as Gershen Kaufman stated in his book Shame: The Power of Caring, "There is no more humiliating experience than to have another person who is clearly the stronger and more powerful take advantage of that power and give us a beating." I can personally attest to this. In addition to shaming me with her contemptuous looks, my mother often punished me by hitting me with the branch of a tree, and she often did this outside, in front of the neighbors. The humiliation I felt was like a deep wound to my soul. -DISABLING EXPECTATIONS. Parents who have an inordinate need to have their child excel at a particular activity or skill are likely to behave in ways that pressure the child to do more and more. According to Kaufman, when a child becomes aware of the real possibility of failing to meet parental expectations, he or she often experiences a binding self-consciousness. This self-consciousness - the painful watching of oneself - is very disabling. When something is expected of us in this way, attaining the goal is made harder, if not impossible. Yet another way that parents induce shame in their children is by communicating to them that they are a disappointment to them. Such messages as "I can't believe you could do such a thing" or "I am deeply disappointed in you" accompanied by a disapproving tone of voice and facial expression can crush a child's spirit.

... it became clear to her observers that she was not quick at shifting her facial scenery. It was as though her countenance had so long been set in an expression of unchallenged superiority that the muscles had stiffened, and refused to obey her orders.

As I prepare to leave she walks with me, half deaf and blind, under several ladders in her living room that balance paint and workmen, into the garden where there is a wild horse, a 1930 car splayed flat on its axles and hundreds of flowering bushes so that her eyes swim out into the dark green and unfocussed purple. There is very little now that separates the house from the garden. Rain and vines and chickens move into the building. Before I leave, she points to a group photograph of a fancy dress party that shows herself and my grandmother Lalla among the crowd. She has looked at it for years and has in this way memorized everyone's place in the picture. She reels off names and laughs at the facial expressions she can no longer see. It has moved, tangible, palpable, into her brain, the way memory invades the present in those who are old, the way gardens invade houses here, the way her tiny body steps into mine as intimate as anything I have witnessed and I have to force myself to be gentle with this frailty in the midst of my embrace.

He's as bad as my mother. Maybe worse. He's a market-research consultant. He studies people's facial expressions to see how they feel about commercials and products. He used to be a psychologist but he makes more money helping big corporations dupe the public. The worst part is he can look at your face and say 'Your upper lip just twitched! Anger! You're angry. Don't try to hide it from me, young man. Why does it make you angry when I say those pants make you look like a girl? Doe you have something against girls? Perhaps some unresolved Oedipal feelings?

Look, back in the old days, ravens used to be gentle and white, like doves, okay? But they were terrible gossips. One time I was dating this girl, Koronis. The ravens found out she was cheating on me, and they told me about it. I was so angry, I got Artemis to kill Koronis for me. Then I punished the ravens for being tattletales by turning them black.” Reyna stared at me like she was contemplating another kick to my nose. “That story is messed up on so many levels.” “Just wrong,” Meg agreed. “You had your sister kill a girl who was cheating on you?” “Well, I—” “Then you punished the birds that told you about it,” Reyna added, “by turning them black, as if black was bad and white was good?” “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound right,” I protested. “It’s just what happened when my curse scorched them. It also made them nasty-tempered flesh-eaters.” “Oh, that’s much better,” Reyna snarled. “If we let the birds eat you,” Meg asked, “will they leave Reyna and me alone?” “I—What?” I worried that Meg might not be kidding. Her facial expression did not say kidding. It said serious about the birds eating you. “Listen, I was angry! Yes, I took it out on the birds, but after a few centuries I cooled down. I apologized. By then, they kind of liked being nasty-tempered flesh-eaters. As for Koronis—I mean, at least I saved the child she was pregnant with when Artemis killed her. He became Asclepius, god of medicine!” “Your girlfriend was pregnant when you had her killed?” Reyna launched another kick at my face. I managed to dodge it, since I’d had a lot of practice cowering, but it hurt to know that this time she hadn’t been aiming at an incoming raven. Oh, no. She wanted to knock my teeth in. “You suck,” Meg agreed.

Looking at a human being or even a picture of a human being is different from looking at an object. Newborn babies, only hours old, copy the expressions of adults. They pucker up, try to grin, look surprised, and stick out their tongues. The photographs of imitating infants are both funny and touching. They do not know they are doing it; this response is in them from the beginning. Later, people learn to suppress the imitation mechanism; it would not be good if we went on forever copying every facial expression we saw. Nevertheless, we human beings love to look at faces because we find ourselves there. When you smile at me, I feel a smile form on my own face before I am aware it is happening, and I smile because I am seeing me in your eyes and know that you like what you see.

We are, in a certain way, defined as much by our potential as by its expression. There is a great difference between an acorn and a little bit of wood carved into an acorn shape, a difference not always readily apparent to the naked eye. The difference is there even if an acorn never has the opportunity to plant itself and become an oak. Remembering its potential changes the way in which we think of an acorn and react to it. How we value it. If an acorn were conscious, knowing its potential would change the way it might think and feel about itself. The Hindus use the greeting "Namaste" instead of our more noncommittal "Hello." The connotation of this is roughly, whatever your outer appearance, I see and greet the soul in you. There is a wisdom in such ways of relating. Sometimes we can best help other people by remembering that what we believe about them may be reflected back to them in our presence and may affect them in ways we do not fully understand. Perhaps a sense of possibility is communicated by our tone of voice, facial expression, or certain choice of words . . . Holding and conveying a sense of possibility does not mean making demands or having expectations. It may mean having no expectations, but simply being open to whatever promise the situation may hold and remembering the inability of anyone to know the future. Thoreau said that we must awaken and stay awake not by mechanical means, but by a constant expectation of the dawn. There's no need to demand the dawn, the dawn is simply a matter of time. And patience. And the dawn may look quite different from the story we tell ourselves about it. My experience has shown me the wisdom of remaining open to the possibility of growth in any and all circumstances, without ever knowing what shape that growth may take.

Botox studies pointed in the opposite direction. Somehow, changes in the body—freezing the face with a neurotoxin—were producing changes in the mind: the ability to feel sadness or empathy. The horse appeared to be steering the rider. And we now know why. Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can’t have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other’s facial expressions. With Botox, mimicry becomes impossible, so we feel almost nothing at all.

it turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful at all about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they'd been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion... ...A traditional aural-only conversation.. ...let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exagerrated-facial-expression type of conversation with peoople right there in the room with you, all while seemingg to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.

I first used LSD in my freshman year of high school at a homecoming football game. A friend had taken it too, knew more about it than me, and when asked, told me to just stare at certain things. The friend pointed at a rail that had some paint chipped off it and said "Just look at that... it's trippy." I looked at the rail with some paint chipped off. Nothing happened. I was in front of the school after the game was over and must have been high because two friends were in front of me crying. I asked them why they were crying and they said because I had taken acid. "Are you going to tell my parents?" I asked. "I don't know," they said. I was afraid. On the way home someone in the car started screaming. We found an albino praying mantis in the car, stopped and let it out. In a friend's room, later, I was lying on the bed and seeing in the corners nets of colors beating. A Nirvana poster was surrounded by color and moving slightly. After this incident there are no memories of taking LSD until senior year of high school. No one paid enough attention to notice I wasn't getting dressed in the morning, just taking acid and going to school in my pajamas. I would walk in the hallways staring forward with a neutral facial expression. I was terribly depressed. My mom eventually found out.

Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there-and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen!

In time, most children stop being puzzled in this way. They settle in. The world around them, as it becomes familiar and daily, becomes ordinary. But for writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness; it remains a matter of questions for which there are no satisfactory answers, of hidden motives, displaced explanations, subtle concealments and mysteries. Eavesdropping of one kind or another, keeping an eye open and an ear cocked, even in public places, for the giveaway facial expression or gesture, the revealing word, becomes a settled habit for the writer, a necessary part of his professional equipment: the laying down of small scraps of information, of observation or experience, for future use.

Etien’s very depressed,” Ghosh said. “Not about the cancer, but over his colostomy. He can’t accept the idea of waste coming out from an opening in his abdomen.” Etien had the sheet over his head. When Ghosh examined him, and then said the colostomy looked beautiful, tears welled up in Etien’s big eyes. He wouldn’t look down there. All he said was “Who will marry me now?” Ghosh was surprisingly firm. “Etien, that’s not the part of your body I cut off, the marrying part. You’ll find a woman who loves you, and you’ll explain it to her. If she loves you for yourself, you’ll both be glad that you are alive.” Ghosh’s facial expression brooked no argument, but then he softened. “Etien, imagine if all humans were born with their anus on the belly and that’s where everyone’s waste emerged. Then imagine if someone said they were going to operate on you and reroute your bowel so it opened behind you, between your buttock cheeks, somewhere where you couldn’t see it except in a mirror, and where you could hardly reach it or easily keep it clean …” It took a few seconds, but then Etien smiled. He dabbed his eyes. He ventured a glance down at his colostomy. It was a small step in the right direction.

She looked around the room, glanced over him and Micah waited. Her Gaze passed him, then again. On the third pass she lingered as she continued to watch her, allowing his gaze to memorize those features just before her eyes met his. A jolt od power flashed through him. Her ligth blue eyes flickered with interest, fear, then interest again, as though she wasn't certain which she should feel. He let his gaze continue to hers, let his mind reach out to her, soothe her, ease her. He used his eyes rather than his expression to calm the fear that he knew he would be rising within her. Micah knew the power of a look. When two people touched from across a distance, that touch could be frightening, wary, or a stroke of gentleness. He stroked her gently. He never let his eyes dip below her chin; rather, he let himself take in every nuance of expression, every shift of each facial motion, the flicker of her lashes, the shadows in her eyes, the tension in her small body. She was like a little bird ready to fly. Poised at the edge of her seat.her body stiff and prepared to run. Easy, little bird, he thought, letting his thoughts touch his gaze. There is no pain here; there is no fear.

When I saw you after my dream, it was impossible to go through with anything I'd resolved. You were chilly again, as though you'd intercepted my dream and were so horrified that you thought it best to put distance between us. I wonder if in the universe of sleep, dreams don't fly out and rat on one another's dreamers and hold cloak-and-dagger meetings in the side alleys of our nights where they slip coded messages, which is perhaps exactly what we want them to do for us when we lack the courage to speak for ourselves. Dreams inflect our face, our smile, and on our voice lingers the timbre of desire we weren't willing to hide while dreaming. I wished you'd taken a second look at me and said, You dreamt of me last night, didn't you?

Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?" The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence. "I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference. "I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it--they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words." "Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr. "I have. I sent you some." "But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more." Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but non to amusement, and said: "I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket." He barked again and subsided. Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?" "What? Naturally not." "You'd consider it too cheap." "Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging. "Do you ever go to them?" "No--almost never." "Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?" Yes--and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue." "Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write--that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well.

On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

Much to the scientists’ surprise, the men, after seeing an emotional face for just one fifth of a second—so briefly that it was still unconscious—were more emotionally reactive than the women. But it’s what happened to the men’s facial muscles next that helped me explain Neil’s guy face to Danielle. As the experiment proceeded, at 2.5 seconds, well into the range of conscious processing, the men’s facial muscles became less emotionally responsive than the women’s. The researchers concluded that the men consciously—or at least semiconsciously—suppressed showing their emotions on their faces. Meanwhile, the women’s facial muscles became more emotionally responsive after 2.5 seconds. According to the researchers, this suggests that men have trained themselves, perhaps since childhood, to automatically turn off or disguise facial emotions. The females’ expressions not only continued to mirror the emotion they were seeing on the face in the photo, but they automatically exaggerated it, from a grin to a big smile or from a subtle frown to a pout. They, too, had been practicing this since childhood.

Hyperbolic Suggestion is—as one might infer from the term’s literal interpretation—a method of suggestion induced upon the subject (or subjects), in question, through the blatant and immoderate invocation of hyperbole. Simply stated, excessive exaggeration induces a trance upon the recipient, rendering him or her remarkably susceptible to suggestion. Thus, through the use of a multitude of descriptive adjectives and superlatives, neural mechanisms and pathways are overloaded, as canals and bypasses are burrowed into the thick of the gray matter. The dendrites are, through this process, tuned to a predetermined frequency by which the seeds of suggestion can be sown. When this occurs, the subject becomes incredibly compliant to any orders given at a certain tone of voice. In some cases, orders need not be given. The subject’s attitudes might well be so affected by the hyperbole as to affect his natural tendencies...Emmanuel silently wondered if there existed a perfect combination of words or phrases that could somehow—as in the case of Hyperbolic Suggestion—subvert even the most stubborn of wills. Then again, maybe it wasn’t so much the words as it was how they were spoken: if he achieved exactly the most desirable intonation, rhythm, timing, pitch and pronunciation in his speaking, would his verbal appeals somehow make greater inroads in garnering their consent? There had to be some optimal combination of aspirated consonants, diphthongs, facial expressions and inflection he could somehow affect in order to persuade them effectively. But it seemed that to search for this elusive mixture of ingredients would only prove an onerous task, conceivably of little benefit. In view of this sobering reality, he decided instead to try out a completely different approach from those previous: it occurred to him that his attempts at persuasion might be slightly more effective if he carried them out as dialogues, rather than as monologues.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.