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- 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.
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