Sunday 11 October 2020

facial action coding system

Originally conceived by anatomist Carl-Herman Hjortsjรถ in his 1969 study Mรคnniskans ansikte och mimiska sprรฅket (in English) as a system to qualify and quantify expression and movements, FACS as it was later adopted by multidisciplinary teams proved extremely valuable to psychologists in reading unconscious tells and signals, physicians assessing pain, and to animators in rendering true-to-life characters.  Of course, marketers soliciting feedback have also found this vein of research invaluable.

The underlying protocols articulated over the decades have become an algorithmic procedural to extract, isolate and understand human reaction and encode presentation accordingly—see also here and here for notable exceptions. The derivative Emotional Facial Action Coding System (EMFACS) and the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID), considering the grammar of musculature, give us among other things that it takes more energy to frown than to smile, indexing units and descriptors that characterise the range of reactions progressing from slight to maximum in terms of intensity.