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Introduction

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What is facial fluency?
Highlights
  • We communicate with more than just our words – there is also body language, hand gestures, and the focus of this course – facial expressions.
  • Facial expressions are deeply significant.
    • The core emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, disgust – are universal across all human cultures.
    • We even share facial expressions with animals.
    • When we perceive facial expressions, our bodies register physiological response (example anger, fear).
    • People with blind sight register the same physiological responses, despite not having conscious awareness of it – this is because we have entire systems in our brain fully dedicated to facial recognition that bypass our conscious perception.
    • Emotions give rise to facial expressions, but if you hold a facial expressions for enough time, it will affect your emotions.
  • What is facial fluency?
    • Languages have distinct sounds. Those sounds combine to make words and phrases, and those phrases communicate the speaker's meaning.
    • Verbal fluency is about automatically perceiving and producing these speech sounds to understand others and express yourself.
    • The muscles of our face contract in specific movements (what are called facial actions), and these actions combine to make facial expressions. These facial expressions communicate the speaker's meaning.
    • Facial fluency is about automatically perceiving and producing these facial actions to express yourself and understand others.
    • Now obviously, you already do this to some degree since you use facial expressions in your everyday life, but you probably do it unconsciously.
    • Facial fluency is about bringing all of this to your conscious awareness. Doing this will give you lots of benefits in communication, which I’ll go over in next video.
Why pursue facial fluency?