Why You May Not Recognize That Someone Is Hurting

Someone close to you is hurting, and one would imagine that it would be easy to tell from the person’s body language that they are in pain. However, actually detecting when someone is in pain from their body language is not that easy.

Research has suggested that there are universal facial expressions of certain basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, anger), and most people can recognize these everywhere in the world. But what about pain? Is there a universal facial expression associated with pain?

Research on this topic goes back to the ancient Greeks. Hippocrates – the “father” of medicine – suggested that his students look first at the patient’s face to detect pain. Charles Darwin, who argued for universal facial expressions of emotion, believed there was a pain face, but subsequent research hasn’t found the definitive “face of pain.”

So, why might you not recognize that a partner or loved one is in pain? There are several reasons.

1. Display Rules. These are social norms that pressure people to try to cover up strong emotional expressions. Because pain is a negative emotion, people may tend to try to hide their pain. That’s why, in research, it has been shown that smiling sometimes occurs when a person is in pain – it’s an attempt to cover up the true feeling.
2. Subtle Facial Cues. Some portions of the face and facial expressions may be more consistently associated with the experience of pain. For example, furrowing of the brow, narrowing of the eyes, raising the upper lip, and a stretched, open mouth are nonverbal cues that are commonly, but not always, associated with the face of pain. These cues may be too subtle to detect with any consistency.
3. Conflicting Emotional Cues. Recent research suggests that we may miss the cues associated with pain and mistake them for another negative emotion, such as anger or displeasure. That may be why, when interacting with someone in pain, we come away thinking that the person is irritated or upset by us.
4. Poor Nonverbal Decoding Skill. Research clearly shows significant individual differences in people’s ability to “read” others’ body language. In many cases, we may either ignore obvious cues that someone is hurting, or we may “see” another emotion (“she’s smiling, so she must be happy!”). If you are not very good at decoding nonverbal cues, there are two things you can do: You can work to develop better decoding skills [it’s not easy and takes a lot of work!], or you can remember to ask questions when you detect that something is amiss.

Nonverbal communication expert Alan Crawley co-authored this post.

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