facial expression
- noun
- /ˈfeɪʃəl ɪkˈsprɛʃən/
- During the movie, I watched her facial expression change from excitement to shock.
- facial expressions and gestures
- facial expressions and posture
- facial expressions and tone
I laugh, I cry, I make the facial expressions of the characters.
- I laugh, I cry, I make the facial expressions of the characters.
- So facial expression, eye contact, gesture.
- Silence took over and Ethan's facial expressions changed.
- But will they will they actually pick up like emotional facial expressions?
- So let's expand it out and say non verbal facial expressions.
- So we respond to social cues, to facial expressions.
- I, I can't get into football because you can't see their facial expression, right?
- Overt, are you getting my facial expressions?
- So the difference between frustration, fear, anger, sadness in facial expressions.
- And on top of that, we humans now add the voice along with those facial expressions.
- Yeah, look just how my facial expression, I'm wincing, squinting.
- They were eyes if if I had to attach a word to it to the facial expression fear.
Examples
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The boys were instructed to maintain a neutral facial expression and a natural body posture for these photographs.
Academic text (1993) -
Students physically responded to the music through their body movements, voice inflections, and facial expressions.
Academic text (2015) -
Eyes are also very important to give a facial expression to the character.
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...and it's her facial expression... ...her eyes that makes you think that.
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John, you have seven different facial expressions.
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Good facial expressions, if a little forced.
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And the way we absorb it is from the facial expressions of your parents and the people around you.
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In other words, facial expressions are not cultural, at least not exclusively cultural.
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Sociopaths sometimes have trouble reading facial expressions.
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The child began to read social signals and communicate nonverbally with facial expressions and body language.
Academic text (2013)
Synonyms
The expression that shows a person's feelings
An expression on the face that shows a feeling
A look on the face that shows what someone feels or thinks
A person's face or the expression on it that shows mood
A movement of the face to show emotion or send a message without words
An expression on a person's face that shows their feelings
How Expressive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and transparently derived from 'facial' (related to the face) plus 'expression' (a visible sign of feeling), so the compound denotes a look or movement of the face showing emotion. This compositional pattern is cross-linguistically common and follows standard noun + adjective/headword semantics, so a B1 learner who knows both words would readily understand it.
Etymology
Facial expression is a simple picture: it is how a face 'shows' a person's feelings. The word facial means the face and expression means 'showing', so together they mean a look that tells what someone feels.