Contextual Emotion: The Kuleshov Effect and the Cognitive Illusion of Facial Expressions

We implicitly trust our ability to read the emotions of others. If someone looks sad, we believe their face tells the objective truth. However, human facial expressions are far less concrete than we realize, heavily heavily manipulated by the environment surrounding them.

In the 1910s, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated this with a groundbreaking experiment. He took an identical, expressionless shot of an actor's face and alternated it with images of a bowl of soup, a child in a coff...