BodyLingual

After parting from our ape cousins some six million years ago, us humans have evolved easily readable faces. Hairless where we need them to be - the forehead and area around the eyes - we are able to recognise one another, read each other’s emotions and spot intentions, helped by our elongated eyes with their exposed sclera (the white bit) making gaze direction visible. We also use our easily readable faces to emit our own feelings to others. However, we wrongly use people’s faces to make snap judgments about their character , it’s a mistake we can’t help. Our brains have not adapted to our age.   Konner (1982) [1] suggested that our interest in faces originally adapted to unravel kinship. In other words, from an early age, we are on the lookout for the presence or not of shared ancestry. It’s true that babies are drawn to faces, and from two-days-old they can recognise their mother’s face, staring longer at it (and a caregiver’s) than a stranger’s, as demonstrated by Bushnell et al