I am really surprised to read that, given that you are a mental health patient - have not you seen your records?

I also do not think that you understood my point, because you believe that I am judging everybody by the look on the professional SN profile picture. Most people - 95% of them - cannot be judged this way. This is because they have standard smiles, standard facial expressions, etc. And, they look appropriate for a professional social network. In other words, by the looks, 95% of people who did the minimal due diligence by asking a competent photographer to shoot pictures for a professional social network are like black boxes - you cannot say anything about them other than that they are equipped with basic common sense and, in the case of professional pictures, their photographers knew what they are doing.

But the other - the figures are obviously rough approximations - who fall in the weird 5% are suspicious. A long tail of the distribution.

Plus, you are talking about topless as in "risque". I was talking about a sleazy facial expression - sleazy, but not risque. Just something is seriously off. You cannot have a topless photo on a professional social network anyway.

But facial expressions do speak volumes and professionals (psych) use facial expression as one of the top elements that go in the progress note for each visit. That is why I am surprised to read your post because I assume that most people have read at least a portion of their psych records; maybe this is a wrong assumption and maybe people who do not have court cases involving such records do not read progress notes.

About one year into my current therapy, I emailed my therapist forwarding her a message sent many months ago by my ex H. She looked him up on FB. She said - "but this is a psychopath and it is written on his face, now that I have seen his headshot, everything that you have been saying makes perfect sense". Recently my ex updated his facebook picture and my older cousin called the picture "a clinical case that is obvious to an untrained eye" and now I do see that she is right and I would not even go into what is wrong with his face. So many things. My late mother was very much against my marrying him, my father first liked him but then decided that he was a manipulator and a thief and boy was he right, but I mistrusted all the input from my relatives and sided with the ex as if he were a victim of the horrible world that does not understand the depths of his unique personality. So after that fiasco I have learned to read faces and I can say that my ex' smile is a total giveaway but I do not know the terminology to describe what is wrong about his smile. It probably does not open fully... hard to put my finger on it, but it is unlike most smiles I have ever seen and this enough to make conclusions. My mother only saw him once or twice but made a perfect assessment of his person, and so did many of my close friends, again, from seeing him once. But... I had to pay a very high price for opening my eyes at last.

***

Psychiatrists note affect, constricted or not, whether there is a wide stare, those things. Plus, a big bulk of the world's literary cannon is devoted to describing facial expressions, so unless we pronounce delusional the likes of Charles Dickens and, of course, Agatha Christie herself (speaking of a master class in face reading), I cannot quite see how reading faces is delusional.

Also note that you talked about physical appearance. I am not sure what you mean by it. Appearance is noted in progress notes, e.g. if someone came disheveled, a psychiatrist would write it down, but it is not as important as the facial features and expressions. But you say "physical appearance", and in the case of a head shot, I am not sure what it means. Note that I was talking about the look, and not appearance - they are not perfect synonyms and inside the broad term "look" is the facial expression that was my signal.

Speaking of CIA - now that I have written about my ex, I actually think that finally I am ready to work for the CIA even though I meant it as a joke originally.

My ex has always been stopped by the police because of a suspicious look, in airports for a security check etc. Again and again. He is white so racial prejudice could not have been implicated. He does not have anything unusual (piercings etc.) that could have been triggering somebody's prejudice. He dresses in the simplest way. Only his face was what made him get stopped and searched so many times.

The only one time I was stopped last year was because (as was explained to me at the end of the investigation) the underwire in my bra, which is made of metal, made me "beep". But just on the basis of how my face looks, I have never been stopped and he has been stopped again and again and again.

He used to complain that this is because of me - when he was in my presence and we would travel together, he would not be stopped, but when he traveled alone during the marriage or after the marriage, he would repeatedly get stopped and searched, so he said that I was at fault because he wanted to live with me but could not so ... I know this is like a pathetic broken record by now so I would stop.


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To sum up, psychiatrists, writers, psychologists, police officers, airport security workers so far have been relying on facial expressions quite extensively. What will happen in the future is unclear because cosmetic surgery often removes this signal - Bill Clinton had such a good face before cosmetic surgery (brilliant, funny, lots of teeny tiny wrinkles moving across this face as he spoke) and now looks like he is a well-embalmed corpse with an embedded robot to make him walk and talk. When I think that 20 years from now I will be surrounded by walking/talking well-embalmed corpses everywhere, I get really sad.

Moving away from sleazy guys, here is how much a face tells you about the person:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-_WGA19189.jpg

This is not a perfect example because the hands and the posture mean a lot, though.

This one is a better example and is actually called a "study".
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