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Family Heirloom: Facial Expressions
Facial Expressions May Run in the Family, Study
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By Miranda Hitti
WebMD Medical News
Does your family have a signature
facial expression -- a certain smile, raised
eyebrows, or scowl, perhaps?
Such expressions may be etched in
your genes, a new study shows.
The study, published in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, comes from
experts at University of Haifa in Israel.
They included graduate student Gili
Peleg and Eviatar Nevo, PhD, professor of
evolutionary biology and director of the
university's Institute of Evolution.
Peleg, Nevo, and colleagues studied
21 people, each from a different family, who had
been born blind.
The researchers interviewed
participants and 30 of their relatives to provoke
facial expressions of sadness, anger, and joy.
An analysis of videotaped interviews
showed similar facial expressions among the blind
participants and their sighted relatives.
Since the blind people couldn't have
learned those expressions by watching their
relatives' faces, genetics might explain the family
facial patterns, the researchers note.
For instance, one of the blind men in
the study had been abandoned by his mother two days
after birth, according to the researchers.
The man and his birth mother met
again when the man was 18 years old and on rare
occasions afterwards.
"Nevertheless, they demonstrated a
unique family facial expression signature," the
researchers write.
But the study doesn't link any
particular genes to facial expressions.
"Although we are still far from
discovering the genes that influence facial
expression, our study is an essential stage in the
process of unraveling the genetic basis of facial
expressions," the researchers write.
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