To create this article, volunteer authors worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has been viewed 16, times. Learn more Facial expressions are imperative in American Sign Language. They distinguish a question asked: whether it's a who, what, when, where, and why question or a yes or no question.
Describing characters: How to describe faces imaginatively
Describing Characters: How to Describe Faces | Now Novel
People used to think that there are six universal facial expressions, but scientists have come up with a longer facial expressions list that consists of 21 distinct emotions. We are not going to discuss complicated expressions like happily disgusted and angrily surprised, instead, we'll list 15 commonly seen facial expressions and their meanings. See if you can identify these facial expressions in people around you. This expression is often shown by the scrunching of the forehead and nose, sometimes with one raised eyebrow, and lips pursed together. A person looks surprised when they have widened eyes and a gaping mouth.
Face it — sometimes you must give your readers a countenance-based clue about what a character or a subject is feeling. First try conveying emotions indirectly or through dialogue, but if you must fall back on a descriptive term, try for precision:. Absent : preoccupied 2. Agonized : as if in pain or tormented 3.
The most notable research into the topic came from psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered research into emotion recognition in the s. His team of researchers provided their test subjects with photos of faces showing different emotional expressions. The test subjects then had to define the emotional states they saw in each photo, based on a predetermined list of possible emotions they had seen prior.