A Face Can Tell A Thousand Stories

Former Bellevue, Wash., police and training officer Glenna Trout believes “face reading” can give law enforcement officers an insight into an individual’s strengths and beliefs as well as to information they may not be willing to share. A person’s face carries the majority of all information he transmits, says Trout, who has studied face reading for more than 20 years and now devotes her time to conducting courses on the subject for law enforcement officials from around the world.

By using the tools she has developed, Trout shows students in her introductory workshops how to recognize and “read” many aspects of a person’s face–including personality styles, life experiences, underlying beliefs, attitudes, and health issues. These techniques can lead to improved communication and observation skills through a deeper understanding of individual belief and behavior patterns, and can also expand an officer’s interview and interrogation abilities, Trout says.

Trout’s research has found that emotional expressions such as joy, anger, sadness, and disgust can “scroll” across a face at a rate of 64 per second, and that it is possible to learn to “freeze frame” the sequences of emotions revealed on a person’s face and develop an approximation of what they choose to show the world.

“Learning to recognize these emotional ‘legos’ and being aware of the complex combinations of emotions as they scroll across the face will provide a tremendous amount of insight into such things as how an individual feels about life in general, their current situation and their attitude toward others,” Trout says. “You can learn to recognize the underlying emotional canvas [long-standing or deep-seated emotions], how that canvas differs from more transient emotions, and what this all means in the message the individual is communicating to you.”
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Law Enforcement Technology (11/05) Vol. 32, No. 11, P. 60; Falcon, Melanie .