Emotional expression<unk> s are essential to expressing emotion, consciously or unconsciously. A frown denotes disapproval; a smile usually means someone is pleased. Being able to read emotion in another's<unk>  is "the fundamental basis for empathy and the ability to interpret a person’s reactions and predict the probability of ensuing behaviors". One study used the Multimodal Emotion Recognition Test to attempt to determine how to measure emotion. This research aimed at using a measuring device to accomplish what people do so easily everyday: read emotion in a<unk> . The muscles of the<unk>  play a prominent role in the expression of emotion, and vary among different individuals, giving rise to additional diversity in expression and facial features. Variations of the risorius, triangularis and zygomaticus muscles. People are also relatively good at determining if a smile is real or fake. A recent study looked at individuals judging forced and genuine smiles. While young and elderly participants equally could tell the difference for smiling young people, the "older adult participants outperformed young adult participants in distinguishing between posed and spontaneous smiles". This suggests that with experience and age, we become more accurate at perceiving true emotions across various age groups. Perception and recognition The<unk>  perception mechanisms of the brain, such as the fusiform<unk>  area, can produce facial pareidolias such as this famous rock formation on Mars Gestalt psychologists theorize that a<unk>  is not merely a set of facial features, but is rather something meaningful in its form. This is consistent with the Gestalt theory that an image is seen in its entirety, not by its individual parts. According to Gary L. Allen, people adapted to respond more to<unk> s during evolution as the natural result of being a social species. Allen suggests that the purpose of recognizing<unk> s has its roots in the "parent-infant attraction, a quick and low-effort means by which parents and infants form an internal representation of each other, reducing the likelihood that the parent will abandon his or her offspring because of recognition failure". Allen's work takes a psychological perspective that combines evolutionary theories with Gestalt psychology. Biological perspective Research has indicated that certain areas of the brain respond particularly well to<unk> s. The fusiform<unk>  area, within the fusiform gyrus, is activated by<unk> s, and it is activated differently for shy and social people. A study confirmed that "when viewing images of strangers, shy adults exhibited significantly less activation in the fusiform gyri than did social adults". Furthermore, particular areas respond more to a<unk>  that is considered attractive, as seen in another study: "Facial beauty evokes a widely distributed neural network involving perceptual, decision-making and reward circuits. In those experiments, the perceptual response across FFA and LOC remained present even when subjects were not attending explicitly to facial beauty".
Face
Sexual function
Psychodynamics
Lint 
Itch
Auxology
Body image 
Lifestories