Micro Expressions: The 7 Universal Expressions and Can You Read Them?

Micro expressions are one of the most quoted ideas in popular psychology and one of the least understood. Films and TV shows present them as a window into a person's hidden feelings, a flash on the face that a trained observer catches and a liar cannot control. The real story is more interesting, and more cautious. The flashes exist and have been filmed, but they are rare, they are easy to miss, and the research on using them to catch lies is a long way from the confident claims.

This page covers what micro expressions are, the seven emotions they are usually sorted into, how they differ from ordinary expressions, what the evidence says about lie detection, and how to train your eye without fooling yourself. If you are here for the performing side, the last section looks at how mentalists use faces on stage.

What Are Micro Expressions?

Every face does two things at once. It moves on purpose, when you smile at a friend or frown at a bill, and it moves on its own, when a feeling pushes through before you have decided what to show. Micro expressions belong to the second group. They are very short versions of an emotional expression, and the idea is that they appear when a person tries to hide or hold back what they feel.

Micro Expressions Meaning

A review of facial expression coding on PubMed Central describes micro-expressions as brief, subtle and involuntary facial expressions, lasting roughly between one twenty-fifth and one fifth of a second, and notes the traditional view that people show them in high-risk situations when they try to hide or suppress genuine feelings. Paul Ekman's own site puts it as half a second or less, and adds that at one twenty-fifth of a second a micro expression can be hard to recognize.

Three things define the term: the expression is short, it is involuntary, and it is linked to an emotion the person may not want to show. Take away any one of those and you have something else, such as an ordinary quick smile.

Who Discovered Micro Expressions?

The first report is usually credited to Ernest Haggard and Kenneth Isaacs. In 1966, while reviewing films of psychotherapy sessions over many hours, they noticed expressions too fast to see at normal speed, according to theWikipedia summary of the research. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen then made faces the centre of their work. Their cross-cultural studies, among them the 1969 paper by Ekman, Sorenson and Friesen titled Pan-Cultural Elements in Facial Displays of Emotion and a 1971 study of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, argued that certain expressions of emotion are shared across cultures. That is the base on which the later claims about hidden feelings were built.

The 7 Micro Expressions

Ekman's list of universal emotions has seven entries. The same seven are used for micro expressions, because a micro expression is understood as a very short version of one of them. Ekman's site calls the last positive one enjoyment, while most popular lists say happiness, so you will see both names. The descriptions below come from his pages on each emotion. They are the textbook version, and real faces are messier.

Anger

In anger the eyebrows come down and together, the eyes glare, and the corners of the lips narrow. The lowered, drawn-together brows are the feature to look for first.

Contempt

Contempt is the only one of the seven with a one-sided expression. The face becomes asymmetrical, sometimes with a hint of a smile and sometimes with an angry look. It signals a feeling of superiority or scorn, and it is the expression most often confused with a smirk or a half-smile that means something friendlier.

Disgust

The clearest sign of disgust is the wrinkling of the nose. Disgust can be about a smell or taste, and it can be about a person or an idea, so the same nose wrinkle can follow a bad sandwich or a bad suggestion.

Fear

In fear the eyebrows are straighter and more horizontal than in surprise, the upper eyelids rise higher so that more of the white of the eye shows, and the lips are tensed and stretched. Fear is the expression most often mixed up with surprise, and the brows and lips are the quickest way to tell them apart.

Happiness (Enjoyment)

The main change is a smile, and the key detail is whether it reaches the eyes. A genuine enjoyment smile, known as a Duchenne smile, is most often identified by the crow's feet around the eyes. People also smile without feeling happy, to be polite or to cover another emotion, which makes the smile the most common mask of all.

Sadness

One very strong and reliable sign of sadness is the angling up of the inner corners of the eyebrows. Few people can move those muscles on purpose, so Ekman describes this change as hard to fake. Seeing it, even briefly, tells you something is being felt.

Surprise

In surprise the eyes are wide open, the eyebrows are raised and the jaw drops open. The brows are more curved than in fear, and the upper eyelids and jaw are more relaxed. Surprise and fear share wide eyes, so the brows and the jaw are what separate them.

The Seven at a Glance

The third column is the editorial view of this page, not a finding from a study: it lists the lookalikes you are most likely to meet in real life, and it is the reason a single frame should never settle a question.

Micro vs Macro vs Subtle Expressions

Micro expressions are the best known of three categories, and mixing them up is behind many of the wrong claims online.

Macro Expressions

These are the ordinary ones, the full expressions you see all day. Wikipedia's summary notes that emotional expressions typically last between half a second and four seconds, long enough to read without effort. Most of what people mean when they say someone looks angry or happy is a macro expression.

Micro Expressions

Full-face expressions that are over almost before they begin. The key limit is speed: at roughly a fifth of a second or less, you are asking your eyes to resolve something faster than you can normally describe.

Subtle Expressions

Subtle expressions are different. They are not defined by speed but by size: a small movement in one part of the face, such as the brows, eyelids, cheeks, nose or lips. Ekman's training programme treats them as a separate skill from micro expressions, with a tool of its own that covers how emotions appear in a single region of the face. Subtle expressions can last long enough to see, which makes them an easier target for beginners than true micro expressions.

Can Micro Expressions Tell If Someone Is Lying?

This is the question behind most searches for the topic, and the honest answer is: not in any way you can rely on. The reasoning behind the idea is neat. A liar feels something they want to hide, the feeling leaks, and a trained observer catches it. Each step in that chain has problems, which is why research on the subject has become more doubtful over time.

The Evidence

The most cited test is a 2008 study by Stephen Porter and Leanne ten Brinke in the journal Psychological Science. Volunteers looked at disgusting, sad, frightening, happy and neutral images and answered each with a genuine or a faked expression, and the researchers analysed every frame of 697 expressions. Micro expressions appeared in only 2 percent of all expressions, were shown by about 22 percent of the volunteers, and appeared only in the upper or lower half of the face. Untrained observers did only slightly better than chance at spotting the deception. The Wikipedia summary of the research adds a note of caution from David Matsumoto: detecting a micro expression does not justify concluding that someone is lying.

Put plainly, an expression that occurs in about one case in fifty, and only in part of the face, cannot carry much weight as a tell.

The TSA SPOT Programme

The best-known real-world use was SPOT, the US Transportation Security Administration's Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques programme, in which officers watched travellers for behavioral indicators. In a report titled Aviation Security: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities, published in November 2013, the Government Accountability Office concluded that available evidence did not support whether behavioral indicators can be used to identify aviation security risks, and that the agency risked funding activities not determined to be effective. The Wikipedia article cites congressional testimony in which only 0.6 percent of 61,000 passenger referrals to law enforcement in 2011 and 2012 resulted in arrests. The programme was not about micro expressions alone, but the idea shaped it.

Why They Are Rare

The 2008 study asked people to fake or hide a feeling on purpose, which is exactly when leakage should show, and flashes were still the exception. Add the speed, add the fact that many other things cause quick facial movements, and a flash tells you little more than that something crossed the person's mind. It does not tell you what, or why.

For the wider picture on what does and does not help, including the research on liars' stories and the common myths, see our guide on how to tell if someone is lying.

Have Micro Expressions Been Debunked?

Two claims travel together in popular articles and they need to be separated. The first is that micro expressions exist. The second is that they reliably expose lies. The evidence treats them very differently.

That the flashes exist is not in serious dispute: they have been recorded and studied, and the PubMed Central review above treats them as a real phenomenon that is difficult to collect because they are so hard to elicit and annotate. What is contested is how much they tell you.

• Universality is debated. The Wikipedia article on Ekman notes that several other psychologists of emotion did not find support for his taxonomy of discrete emotions and discrete facial expressions, and that critics described his photo-selection method as circular.
• Lie detection is weak. The 2008 results and the 2013 GAO report above point the same way: rare expressions, observers barely above chance, and a government programme whose indicators lacked scientific support.
• Misuse has costs. According to the Wikipedia summary of micro expression research, Maria Hartwig has argued that the approach has contributed to innocent suspects being jailed after aggressive interrogations based on perceived micro expressions.

A fair summary is that micro expressions are a real, short and hard-to-use signal, and the claim that a trained observer can read lies from them has not been demonstrated. Even Ekman's training page does not cite independent evidence that the training improves lie detection, and describes its goals as increasing emotional awareness and detecting deception.

How to Practise Reading Faces

If lie detection is the wrong goal, a better one is emotional awareness: noticing sooner when a person is uneasy, bored, pleased or confused, so you can adjust what you say. That is a skill worth building, and it is built the same way as any other perceptual skill, with repetition and feedback.

Training Tools

The best-known option is Ekman's own set of online tools. The Micro Expressions Training Tool (METT) trains people to spot micro expressions, and the Subtle Expressions Training Tool (SETT) covers how emotions appear in one region of the face. According to his site they are web-based, combine photos, video and commentary, follow a learn, practise and test pattern, and give a certificate at a score of 80 percent or higher. As noted above, the site cites no independent evidence on how much they improve real-world detection, so treat them as a way to learn the textbook expressions, which they probably do well, and not as a lie detector.

A Simple Mirror and Video Drill

You can build the basics for free in a few minutes a day.

How Mentalists Use Faces on Stage

A performer does not need to catch micro expressions to look as if they are reading minds. What helps on stage is much simpler: watching how a volunteer's face and body react when they hear a word or a number, and shaping a reading around those reactions. A performer who sees a volunteer's face tighten when a question comes close to something personal can back away, and one who sees an easy smile can say a little more. It is attention and a good response, and no secret sense.

The same skill is described in detail in our guide on how to read people, which has a section on the face and the other cues worth watching. Faces work together with careful wording in cold reading, where the performer makes general statements and adjusts them to the reaction. The wider toolbox, including how performers combine observation with other methods, is in our overview of mentalism techniques.

One caution for performers: because the research is so mixed, never present face reading as proof of a real ability to detect lies or thoughts. Presented as a game of observation, it is honest and still impressive.