Facial Gestures
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Facial Gestures | |
|---|---|
| Author(s): | Carolin Dix (University of Innsbruck, Austria) & Alexandra Groß (University of Bayreuth, Germany) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8850-0605) |
| To cite: | Dix, Carolin, & Groß, Alexandra. (2026). Facial Gestures. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ] |
The term facial gestures – similarly, facial conversational signals (Ekman 1979: 169), conversational facial gestures (Bavelas & Chovil 2018) or facial displays (Chovil 2024: 113) – refers to movements of parts of the human face that are used by interlocutors to perform visible actions and serve referential or (meta)pragmatic functions in conversation (Ekman 1979: 169; Bavelas et al. 2014; Chovil 2024: 113). Therefore, facial gestures contribute to action formation (Levinson 2013) and organizing talk-in-interaction. EMCA studies have emphasized their functions for "building intersubjective understanding and affective alignment in co-present interaction, as well as around organizing talk and interaction" (Groß et al. 2023: 2).
The term is used by Ekman (1970: 151), who draws a clear distinction between facial gestures and facial expressions, the latter being related to the display of internal emotional states (Ekman 1970: 151; see also Bavelas & Chovil 2018; Chovil 2024: 112, FN 1; see especially Ekman & Friesen 1969; Ekman 1979). Being taken up within gesture research (Kendon 2004), some studies rather use the term facial expression to refer to both concepts (e.g. Bitti 2014) or to interlocutors’ practices of taking an affective stance (e.g. Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori 2012; Katila 2023).
An additional distinction is made between facial gestures and facial dynamics such as the eye blink or facial movements during a sneeze "which primarily serve physiological functions" (Groß et al. 2023: 2 FN1). While the functions of facial gestures are primarily grounded in conversation, also facial expressions as well as facial dynamics can be made interactively relevant by interlocutors (see Wiggins & Keevallik 2023 for the ‘disgust display’, see Shor 2024 for the ‘eye closure’), i.e., they may be meaningful and consequential for the ongoing conversation.
The different parts of the human face provide a multitude of (combinations of) positions and movements which can be used as facial gestures within social interaction. Kendon (2004: 310) includes "eyebrow movements or positioning, movements of the mouth, head postures and sustainments and changes in gaze direction" as possible bodily resources for facial gestures, but also movements and configurations of forehead, nose, chin, tongue and cheeks can adopt functions of a gesture (Cooperrider & Nunez 2012; see also Groß et al. 2023). While some facial gestures are complex, including more than one facial resource and possibly several additional resources such as head or gaze movements (see the so-called thinking face (Goodwin & Goodwin 1986; Heller 2021), which consists of a middle-distance look and several additional elements such as raising or lowering the eyebrows), others rather appear as single-form facial gestures, such as the eyebrow flash (e.g., Ekman 1979), the horseshoe mouth (e.g., Chovil 2024: 121), or the eye roll (Clift 2021). Facial gestures can be produced by current speakers as well as by recipients (e.g., Feyaerts et al. 2022); they occur as co-speech gestures as well as stand-alone elements in various sequential environments in face-to-face or computer-mediated settings. To date, the conversational use of facial resources as facial gestures has been the object of numerous studies in the tradition of EMCA and related interactional approaches describing and highlighting the multimodal complexity and multifunctionality of facial gestures in social interaction (see Andries et al. 2023; Holler 2025):
- The eyebrow raise has been described as a co-speech gesture during turn-production, e.g., for signalling an open-repair request (in contrast to frowns which signal restricted repair, see Hömke et al. 2025; Stolle & Pfeiffer 2023, Wang & Li 2023). Placed in the transition space after turn-production, prolonged eyebrow raises, in contrast, can mobilize reactions to (counter-)challenging or humorous actions (Clift & Rossi 2023). Used in responses, eyebrow raises can be part of the multimodal display of a changed state of mind and surprise (Mondada 2011; Heath et al. 2012; Gudmundsen & Svennevig 2020; Dix & Groß 2023; Reis de Souza 2024). As an embodied part of sequence-initiating turns, it is used for the formation of requests for information (Nota et al. 2021, 2023), or for making offers (Kärkkäinen & Keisanen 2012). Figure 1 illustrates the use of the eyebrow raise as part of a response to news:
Figure 1: Eyebrow raise in response to news (Dix & Groß 2023)
- Frowns appear in contexts where interlocutors signal a problem in understanding (Kääntä 2014), to initiate repair (Oloff 2018; Hömke et al. 2025), to project misaligning conversational moves (Kaukomaa et al. 2014), as well as to enact post-consumption disgust (Wiggins & Keevallik 2023). Frowns may also be part of the thinking face.
- Smiles are used for projecting emotional transitions before turn-beginnings (Kaukomaa et al. 2013) or for modalizing potential serious content in narratives (Bavelas & Chovil 2018). Smiles further occur as affiliative and empathic recipient’s reactions, e.g., during tellings (e.g., Chovil 1991; Ruusuvuori & Peräkylä 2009; Kupetz 2014; Selting 2017).
- The mouth shrug, used by recipients or in responsive position, can display the absence of knowledge (Chovil 2024: 121).
- The thinking face as a complex configuration of several facial resources is used for signalling ongoing involvement within a word search (Goodwin & Goodwin 1986), for joint imagination in argumentative activities (Heller 2021) and for initiating other-repair (Stolle & Pfeiffer 2023). Used by recipients, it can signal trouble (e.g., a referential problem), leading speakers to initiate repair.
- The eye roll has been described as a resource for embodying dissent and for pursuing affiliation with another party (Clift 2021).
- The eye blink can be used as addressee feedback (Hömke et al. 2017).
- Prolonged eye closure has been identified for displaying concentration; it has been observed to accompany verbal hedging and extreme case formulations. It can also be used in rejections (Shor 2024).
- The closed endolabial lip rounding (Catford 1988) has been described as a resource for lip pointing (Enfield 2001).
- Similarly, the wrinkling of the nose can be used as a deictic gesture (Cooperrider & Nunez 2012).
Typically, the uses of the aforementioned facial gestures are gestalt-like, in that the same facial gestures can serve different conversational functions depending on their multimodal embedding. Also their sequential and turn-related context, i.e., their exact temporal synchronization with the verbal conduct of conversational actions, has been emphasized as constitutive for their functional potential: Early facial gestures, e.g. in responses, can have predictive potential in that they project the orientation of the social action (see the review by Holler 2025; for early responses see Deppermann & Schmidt 2021; Mondada 2021). On the other hand, facial gestures may become part of a response as one element in multimodal response packages (Kärkkäinen & Thompson 2018).
EMCA studies also acknowledge differences in the internal temporal unfolding of facial movements. Dix & Groß (2023) describe the eyebrow flash and the eyebrow hold as two distinctive temporal formats of raised eyebrows, serving different interactive functions when used in response to new information. While the former displays news receipt, the latter is observed to be part of a multimodal surprise display (for different temporal manifestations of gestures, see also Clift & Rossi 2023 for the eyebrow flash vs. hold in the transition space, for the eye blink (Hömke et al. 2017) vs. prolonged eye closure (Shor 2024)).
Additional Related Entries:
Cited References:
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