document with a camera the workings of the muscles of the
face. If I were to ask you to smile, you would flex your
zygomatic major. By contrast, if you were to smile
spontaneously, in the presence of genuine emotion, you would
not only flex your zygomatic but also tighten the orbicularis
oculi, pars orbitalis, which is the muscle that encircles the eye.
It is almost impossible to tighten the orbicularis oculi, pars
orbitalis on demand, and it is equally difficult to stop it from
tightening when we smile at something genuinely pleasurable.
This kind of smile “does not obey the will,” Duchenne wrote.
“Its absence unmasks the false friend.”
Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is
automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. That
response may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second
or be detectable only if electrical sensors are attached to the
face. But it’s always there. Silvan Tomkins once began a lecture
by bellowing, “The face is like the penis!” What he meant was
that the face has, to a large extent, a mind of its own. This
doesn’t mean we have no control over our faces. We can use
our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those
involuntary responses. But, often, some little part of that
suppressed emotion — such as the sense that I’m really unhappy