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Getting to Know Your Patient: How Facial Expression Can Help Reveal True Emotion

  • Chapter
The Human Face

Abstract

The moment the patient/client walks in the door a wide variety of information about this patient becomes available to the clinician or Health Care Provider (from here abbreviated to HCP). Not only is written information on the charts or notes about past history available to the HCP, but there is visual information in the clothing of the patient that communicates socio-economic status, marital status, and self-image; visual information in the body that communicates the patient’s sex, ethnicity, and physical strength; visual information in the body movements that communicates fatigue, enthusiasm, anxiety, extroversion or introversion, dominance or submissiveness; auditory information in the voice that communicates ethnicity, fatigue, anxiety, dominance or submissiveness, and current emotional state, and olfactory information that communicates self-image and hygiene (reviewed by Knapp & Hall, 1997). These are by no means the only things communicated through these channels. Regardless, a problem with all these nonverbal clues is that they are only probabilistically related to what they predict. For example, although impoverished patients may own more worn clothes, affluent patients may also own worn clothes. Furthermore, it is possible for thin patients to be physically strong; the lack of a wedding band does not necessarily mean a patient is not married, and so forth. Although this information can be helpful to the HCP understanding his or her patient, it is not accurate enough to make diagnostic judgments.

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Frank, M.G. (2003). Getting to Know Your Patient: How Facial Expression Can Help Reveal True Emotion. In: Katsikitis, M. (eds) The Human Face. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1063-5_13

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