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):
Additional Related Entries:
- Complaint
- Compliment
- Context
- Deontics
- Epistemics
- Identity
- Membership Categorization Device
- Participation
- Participation Framework
- Professional Vision
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