abstract word but some sense of what that person is going to do next or what made the person feel

the emotion. Another quite different type of evidence also supports Darwin's claim that facial expressions are universal, a product of our evolution. If expressions do not need to be learned, then those who are born congenitally blind should manifest similar expressions to those of sighted individuals. A number of studies have been done over the past sixty years, and repeatedly that is what has been found, especially for spontaneous facial expressions.14 Our cross-cultural findings provided the impetus to seek answers to a host of other questions about facial expressions: How many expressions can people make? Do expressions provide accurate or misleading information? Is every movement of the face a sign of an emotion? Can people lie with their faces as well as with their words? There was so much to do, so much to find out. Now there are answers to all of these questions, and more. I discovered how many expressions a face can makemore than ten thousand!and identified the ones that appear to be most central to the emotions. More than twenty years ago Wally Friesen and I wrote the first atlas of the face, a systematic description in words, photographs, and films of how to measure facial movement in anatomical terms. As part of this work I had to learn how to make every muscle movement on my own face. Sometimes, to verify that the movement I was making was due to a specific muscle, I put a needle through the skin of my face to electrically stimulate and contract the muscle producing an expression. In 1978 our tool for measuring the facethe Facial Action Coding System (FACS)was published and is now being used by hundreds of scientists around the world to measure facial movements, and computer scientists are busily working on how to make this measurement automatic and speedy.15 I have since used the Facial Action Coding System to study thousands of photographs and tens of thousands of filmed or videotaped facial expressions, measuring each muscular movement in each expression. I have learned about emotion by measuring the expressions of psychiatric patients and the expressions of patients with

1A