More On Facial Reading

BrachaBenedicta asks in the comments

AC, can you recommend a book or guide of some sort to learn about physiognomy? Also, how can I teach that stuff to my kids? That seems so incredibly important.

Here is a good pdf on Affect Psychology, which is fundamental to understanding much of facial reading:

http://www.tomkins.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Primer_of_Affect_Psychology-Kelly.pdf

You can read endlessly on this subject, and you will gain good knowledge. But to supercharge the process and gain practical ability, you need to do the Affect Psychology exercise of making the faces yourself in a mirror and seeing how they feel to your brain.

There is an old psychology principle where you adopt a power-position, standing boldly with your chest jutting out, and you will become more powerful in your psychology.

We see the power-position as an outgrowth of bold power in one’s psychology, and it is. But it turns out the circuitry that causes someone who feels powerful in their brain to adopt a power position with their body also is wired backward, so if you adopt a power position with your body, the brain senses it and feels more powerful and bolder, and will act as if it is. They say the same thing about smiles, that one should smile more, even if they aren’t happy, because their mood will improve due to the smile, and they will feel happier.

The same goes with faces. If you adopt the facial expression of another, you can emulate their mood and psychological “feeling” in your own mind and feel it in yourself. With time doing it in front of a mirror, your visual cortex will link into your deeper emotional memory, and begin to create memories which attach those emotional feelings to the visual input of the facial expressions. Once that happens, you will begin to feel in your mind an emulation of the emotions felt by people when expressing the facial expressions you see on their faces.

As this grows, you will begin to see your amygdala flag as unusual the faces of others which do not provoke an emulation in your mind, or whose emulations seem jumbled or out of context. In some cases you will have not “trained” your brain to recognize the affect they are expressing, or to parse what they are presenting as a public face, and what they are feeling inside. In others, you will realize what you feel is jumbled because someone is trying to deceive, or it doesn’t fit the context in a way you expect, because they are feeling something different, probably because you either mistook the external context (such as them screwing you when you thought you were helping them), or there is something wrong in their brain and they are not feeling the right emotions for the circumstances.

I still get these periodically in photos, but so far I am always able to analyze a photo of the face, going point by point, from chin, to naso-labial line, to upper lip, to lower lip, to area under the eyes, to eye brows, to cheeks, to forehead, to nose, to outer corners of the eyes, and so on until I see what had put me off. Oddly enough, /pol keeps posting pictures of Asian girls all over their threads which were putting me off for a long time. I finally picked up something about the eyes wasn’t emoting like I would have expected – it was as if they had that uncanny valley effect. I figured it was some sort of filter they were using to enlarge their eyes that was disrupting the emotion in them.

It turns out somebody posted that many of those Asian models have operations to open their eyes up and make them larger. If you reach a certain point at this, even in otherwise beautiful girls, those overly-open, empty eyes will create a strange spacy feeling in you, and actually unsettle you when you see them. I am thinking they must damage the muscles which squint and thin the eyes, and as a result those girls seem to have an almost paralysis effect on those squinty muscles on the eyelid which you don’t even realize you expect to see.

You will periodically find yourself getting unsettled in person however, and if you have no photo, it will just nag at you as a feeling you missed something that had happened there. Dwell on those feelings, because replaying the context they arose in can reveal things in interactions that everyone else would miss.

If however you start to feel like almost everyone around you feels “off,” don’t disregard the feeling. Focus on it and see if you aren’t seeing something you had missed about almost everyone around you.

Reading people can have many uses, especially in Apocalypse.

Spread r/K Theory, because knowledge is a powerful tool