Victory Or Defeat? Emotions Aren't All In The Face

[Seventeen]

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/30/166184...ll-in-the-face

So [Hillel Aviezer] and his colleagues decided to do some experiments using images of professional tennis players. That's because, in top tennis matches, the stakes are sky high, and professional players instantly have an intense emotional reaction to winning or losing a critical point. And usually, people have no trouble figuring out what emotions a tennis player is feeling when they see a photo of that player standing on a tennis court, clutching a racket.

"When I look at a sports magazine, and I see the full picture of a person winning a point, and he has his full gesture, the whole picture makes perfect sense to me," says Aviezer. "The face looks like a victorious face, and the body looks victorious; everything together seems to make perfect sense."

But that sense of certainty disappeared, he found, when he took images of tennis winners and losers, and erased everything but the face. When he showed just those isolated faces to people, they couldn't tell if something positive or negative was going on.

[Alchemy-Z]

make sense

since players cry in both victory and defeat...either way they are crying

[ollinger]

Our sense of irony separates us from other species; we laugh (at ourselves) when we do something boneheaded (Djokovic comes to mind in this regard).