Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

The conception of emotions as observable behavioral data first took root in the mid-1960s with the work of Paul Ekman, then a young professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Ekman argued that “actions speak louder than words.” Even when a person is determined to censor or control his or her emotional communications, Ekman postulated that some types of nonverbal behaviors “escape control and provide leakage.” He recognized the potential utility of a “categorical scheme” that reliably traced the effects of expression back to their causes in emotion, and in 1978 Ekman published the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).

FACS distinguishes the elemental movements of facial muscles, breaking them down into twenty-seven facial “action units,” along with more for the head, eyes, tongue, and so on. Later, Ekman concluded that six “basic emotions” (anger, fear, sadness, enjoyment, disgust, and surprise) anchored the wider array of human emotional expression.