Vanessa Van Edwards explains why we're wired to read faces. fMRI scans show that viewing fearful expressions triggers fear in the viewer's brain, a phenomenon called emotional contagion. The stronger the fear displayed, the stronger the fear response in the observer.
Why are we so in need of reading faces? What the research has found is that when we see a face, we catch the emotion. What they did is they put participants in an FMRI machine and they showed them fearful facial expressions. They found that the participants who were observing those fearful faces caught the fear in their own brain. In other words, they began to feel more afraid. The stronger the emotion that was displayed, the more they caught the emotion. So a subtle fear face made me feel kind of afraid. A really fearful phrase made people feel very afraid. And the reason why this is important is because it means we tend to sync up emotions with the emotions we see. So we're always looking for facial expressions because we want to know how should I feel? And that's one of the reasons why facial expression reading is not just important for decoding, it's also important for regulating how we feel, regulating our own emotions.
