Have you ever tried to hide your emotions from someone during a conversation? It's not always easy, as the color of your face might tell the truth.
Scientists from the Ohio State University have found that people are able to tell other people's emotions according to changes in the color of their faces, The Guardian reported.
Scientists studied pictures of people's facial expressions. They found that every facial expression has an only color pattern. For example, happiness makes our faces red around the cheeks and temples and a little blue around the chin. Disgust creates a blue-yellow color around the lips, but also a red-green color around the nose and forehead.
"We believe these color patterns are due to small changes in blood flow triggered by the central nervous system," lead researcher Aleix Martinez told The Guardian.
But this raises a question: Is it the color alone, or also facial expressions, that help people tell others' emotions?
To work this out, scientists added color patterns to pictures of faces that showed no facial expressions. They asked volunteers to tell what emotions the faces were showing. Volunteers were able to accurately tell the emotion 75 percent of the time.
This might explain why there are some sayings that connect emotions to the color of one's face. For example, when two people are heatedly arguing over something, we say they are "red in the face". When a person is very angry, we'd say he or she is "blue in the face".
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Word Bank: emotions 情感 pattern 模式 expression 表情 cheeks 脸颊 temples 太阳穴 chin 下巴 disgust 厌恶 triggered 触发 nervous system 神经系统 accurately 准确地 |
