POLITICAL POINTS
Of Smiles and Sneers
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: July 18, 2004
....to Daniel Hill, who has been cataloging body language on the campaign trail since last fall, the most interesting sight now is the face-off between Teresa Heinz Kerry and George W. Bush...."Teresa and George have the most expressive faces and are the least disciplined and scripted," said Dr. Hill, the president of Sensory Logic, a marketing firm that uses a system developed at the University of California at San Francisco to interpret the movements of 43 muscles in the face. "Both of them show anger with narrowed eyes and tight lips. He shows disgust by raising his upper lip, while she shows it by having the lower lip push down the corners of the mouth."...
***
"Teresa makes me think of a Granny Smith apple - tasty but a bit tart," Dr. Hill said. "The conundrum for Bush is that on one hand he smiles genuinely quite commonly, which is nice and upbeat, but it's combined often with contempt. You can see that either as cockiness or as smugness, depending on how you're oriented to him."
Dr. Hill has only recently noted many genuine smiles from Mr. Kerry. "Since Edwards joined the ticket, Kerry is about as happy a camper as he's going to get, but he's still not very expressive," he said. "Edwards is so smooth and telegenic it's really quite amazing. His genuine smiles have even gone up a notch recently, and he's almost always placid, but lately for the first time he's been narrowing his eyes in a mild expression of anger, as if he's working into the groove of being more combative."
What about Mr. Edwards's opponent, Vice President Dick Cheney? "Only one side of his face moves, and when it does, it's almost always a contempt expression," Dr. Hill said. "Mainly he just doesn't show a lot. I call him the Mana Lisa."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/politics/races/18points.html
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