Facial signals predictive of upcoming social actions

Human language is multimodal, consisting not just of speech but also visual bodily signals. 

Facial signals form part of this multimodal system and contribute to how we accomplish social actions in conversational interaction, such as requesting, informing, proposing or complaining, and the interactional responses that follow.

Such facial signalling strategies seem to be culturally specific, with some clear associations between specific facial signals (or combinations thereof) and social actions within groups, but some basic commonalities across cultures may exist.

A processing account is proposed suggesting how facial signals feed into social action attribution and response planning during conversational interaction.

The recent developments call for a radical reconceptualization of long-standing notions and concepts, first and foremost abandoning the idea of speech acts.

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(25)00079-8

https://sciencemission.com/Facial-signals-predictive-of--social-actions