Post by Kahawa on Feb 27, 2018 3:36:18 GMT -5
^ This is also why caucasian people like Chuck may seem to have upward tension while not being Fi. And inversely, Janet seems to have a wide smile even though the quality of her mouth is definitely Fi/Te as we can see here:
^ Again this photo between Cate Blanchett and Janet Jackson is about as apparent as I can make the distinction without over-generalizing. I dunno how else to put it...
It's super clear to me but maybe that's just because I've seen so many over time. Janet's smile lacks those vertical creases and is instead "smooth" like a gradient, due to the tautness of the skin going up and down.
^ Here is another attempt at highlighting the difference. The "horizontal split" will sometimes be a sharp-ish horizontal line (which is still different from the vertical stretch marks Fe often causes) but often the split looks like a gradient caused by the indentation in tension.
I really should mention again, however, that all these rules are rules of thumb.
There are so many different face types, and exceptions. Because of how anatomy can cause the shape of skin and muscle to change in how it hugs around bone/skin, it's best to example people case by case. And to double-check this signal with dynamic ones. Thanks, this is really helpful.
Do you think that black people have or use the depressor muscles to a similar degree to caucasians? I see a lot of squareness in the 3rd image:
I'm trying to get my head around what muscles are in play, especially if black people have different facial physiology than other ethnicities (not to mention get my head around what must be going on cognitively in order to produce such muscle activation).
Janet's lips spread fairly wide, and if that's not caused by the zygomaticus muscles, could it be the orbicularis oris, and/or even the buccinator? Those are both heavily involved in mouth movement, which, in my understanding (along with the nose) is one of the main sources of snarling and disgust.
As an aside, from your book and explanations and my other readings (I'm not even sure where I'm getting what anymore), I think I understand that an Fi smile is egocentric - it's the activation of muscles used for personal responses to a particular stimulus. E.g., wrinkling one's nose is a personal defense against an offensive smell.
Depending on how you define sympathy and empathy (people aren't always clear), I suspect that an Fi user tends to respond empathetically to others' experiences, e.g., if someone says "This food smells rotten!" the empathetic response is one that responds from the point of view of the first person, thus producing a wrinkled nose response ("My face represents how I would respond if that experience had happened to me.").
An Fe's response to that statement might involve a concerned brow and a jutting lower lip, which are themselves not natural instinctive responses to offensive odours, but are attempts to communicate compassion and shared understanding to the person having the negative experience.
This initially sounds like a more layered and complex emotional response, but it might not necessarily be. An Fe user might be good at reading the necessary emotional connection between individuals, but could be very unaware of what his own response would be in that situation. It's easy to know how we'd respond to a bad smell, but there are ethical dilemmas that are much more complex, and an Fi user might instantly know how he'd respond to that, while an Fe user might be clueless about the dilemma itself but might be able to read the response it's caused in the person experiencing the dilemma, and thus produce the correct facial expressions (unless that's undeveloped) that make that emotional connection.
Anyway, I'm just processing out loud now, but it's helpful for me....
It would be great to have some kind of non-interfering muscle scanning machine (infrared maybe?) that could show smile muscles moving in real time. I suppose that's probably been done somewhere already.
If you tell me a story describing something painful, for example, your nail was torn or something, I will put myself in that first-person place by imagination and start wincing and acting as if I was having something painful happening to my nail, lol. I wonder whether others agree about this, if accurate, it would make the perfect analogy for those two ways of empathy/understanding. Yes, I get what you mean that for Fi/Fe this would be at a deeper level, more sophisticated than bad-smell/torn-nail thing. More like, for the first-person (that's supposed to be Fi) situation, the process is like: If someone did/said that to me, I would feel this way so I probably shouldn't do/say it, or I should apologize for doing/saying it. I have done that a few times to friends who looked at me incredulously and went, "What? Why? That's not upsetting at all! Why do you think so?" 
I think it would be interesting to hear more about the Fe experience...we might see more about that on the INF temperament thread... 
