The Human Face is a BBC documentary series originally broadcast in 2001.  On the first DVD disc are the four episodes of the series, and on the second disc the main features are extended interviews with some of the celebrities and scientists featured in the documentary, including Pierce Brosnan, Candice Bergen, Stephen Marquardt, David Buss and Vilayanur Ramachandaran.  John Cleese is not only the presenter, but also the main writer and interviewer, and his curiosity and humor shapes the whole series.  There are comedy sketches with Elizabeth Hurley, Prunella Scales, and Michael Palin, and Cleese himself keeps a light tone throughout the series in interviews and voice-over.  Although it is a British production and Cleese's humor is rooted in TV sketch comedy going back to Monty Python days, many of the people interviewed are North American and the series should appeal to a wide audience.

The four episodes focus on different aspects of the face.  The first sets out the basic psychology of the face, which has over 7000 different expressions.  Near the start, we are introduced to a little girl who has facial paralysis, and who has surgery to introduce muscles into her face that enable her to smile.  We see a young couple who are having difficulties in their marriage, at least in part because they are not good at reading each other's emotions.  We see a more extreme case in a student with Asperger's syndrome, who lacks the ability to automatically recognize other's emotions, and has to learn to infer emotions from people's facial expressions.  Each of these cases is fascinating, even though the sections on each are short.  Many scientists are interviewed, including Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner, as well as David Attenborough, and Madan Kataria, founder of India's laughter clubs. 

The second episode features two notable disorders.  Vicki, a 21-year-old woman has the genetic disorder of cherubism, which makes her face much larger than normal.  She discusses the effect of her condition on her as she grew up, and the prejudices people have about those with disfigurations.  But the show soon moves to the topic of facial recognition, and our amazing ability to tell people apart so easily.  What's particularly interesting in this is the role of emotion in recognition — we meet a man, David, who after a car accident had the ability to tell who people looked like, but he did not believe that it was them.  He became convinced that his parents had been replaced by replicas, and we see the explanation for this — the brain damage meant that although his 'face recognition center' was functional, when he looked at his mother, for example, he did not get the appropriate emotional response to her face, and so he rationalized this by supposing it was someone who merely looked like her.

The most interesting episode is the third one, on beauty.  It introduces Stephen Marquardt, a facial surgeon who argues that there are objective standards of beauty, based on the proportions of the face.  He has constructed a grid, which he believes encodes universal rules for the beauty of faces.  It is based on a youthful healthy face, with full lips and big eyes.  This goes against the standard view that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that standards of beauty vary from culture to culture.  This view goes hand-in-hand with the ideas of evolutionary psychology that links facial beauty with ability to be a good mate and help to propagate one's genes.  The claims about the role of evolution are familiar enough, but Marquardt's mask is remarkable in its ability to match standards of beauty over many cultures and ages.  The show also emphasizes the dangers of the modern age where we are exposed to beautiful faces all the time, and this decreases our commitment to our existing partners.  This puts pressure on people to want to look more beautiful and we go to extraordinary measures to do this, including cosmetic surgery. 

The final episode takes a look at fame, and spends most of its time in Hollywood.  We meet three aspiring actors who want to be famous, and various experts discuss the role of luck and the face in helping one become successful in our image-conscious culture.  It is entertaining, but does not shed much new light on the subject. 

The extended interviews on the second DVD disc, lasting about ten to twenty minutes each, are fascinating because they provide more detail than the excerpts included in the original show.  We see how uncomfortable Pierce Brosnan when talking about his good looks, eyes blinking rapidly, rubbing his neck and massaging the top of his ears as Cleese probes his feelings about fame and beauty.  Candice Bergen is not only eloquent about the benefits and problems of being attractive, but is also graceful and self-composed in talking about herself, and this of course enhances the viewer's reaction to her.  The interviews with the scientists are rather less personal but they are still insightful.  Vilayanur Ramachandaran is a charismatic guide to the human brain, and the fact that he holds a real human brain in his hands to explain the different areas. 

The Human Face does a great job at explaining psychology to a general audience.  Naturally, it has its limitations: the different parts do not always cohere together very well, for example, and experts are bound to find many of the explanations of technical theories overly simplistic.  But this tends to be true of any popular psychology, so it's not a strong criticism of this production.  The Human Face is worth a look for anyone interested in psychology, and it could be an excellent teaching tool in some psychology courses.

© 2003 Christian Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Psychology