Mark Frank, a professor of communication in the School of Informatics at the University at Buffalo, has taken the art of reading “tells” — unconscious signals that reveal our true emotional states — to a whole new level.

First, Frank “identified and isolated specific and sometimes involuntary movements” of 44 human facial muscles. Movements in these muscles can reveal that a person is feeling “fear, distrust, distress and other emotions related to deception.”

Then Frank developed a computer program to automate the categorization of those expressions, based on a numbering system developed by another facial expression researcher, Paul Ekman. The program makes it a lot faster to analyze expressions.

Before this automation was developed, it took up to three hours of playing, rewinding and replaying, videotapes to analyze a single minute of blinks and twitches.

Frank cautions that “one micro-expression or collection of them is not proof of anything.” They are merely clues. Still, his expertise is being sought by a wide variety of law enforcement and military investigators.

While its application is law enforcement is interesting, I find the subject fascinating for other reasons: when I write fiction, I like to reveal characters’ reactions by subtle changes in their body language and facial expressions. By necessity, of course, many of these will be broader than the kind of muscle twitches Frank studies — someone avoids eye contact, or touches his upper lip, or droops her shoulders slightly. But don’t you love the idea that, as work like Frank’s becomes more mainstream, it will help to enrich the “code” writers can use to communicate a character’s inner state?

You also have to think that controlling microexpressions is one talent that separates “wooden” actors from gifted ones.

This part of the article really cracked me up, though.

Frank says he began to develop identification skills when he was bouncer in a Buffalo bar. He says he trained himself to spot behavior that suggested that patrons were underage, packing a .22 or itching for a fight. He developed a sixth sense that allowed him to spot potential troublemakers by the way they looked when they walked in “like they were trying to get away with something,” he says. These were, for the individuals in question, high-stakes situations.

Everybody’s got to start somewhere, right?