Courtney Waller interviews Sophie Zadeh about her TED-Ed lesson: Are there universal expressions? They discuss the history of emotion, display rules, animal and human expression, botox on expressions, how to trigger emotions, macroexpressions and microexpressions.

I've been quiet on my blog for a while now because I lost my beautiful mother in May. I've wanted to share with you some observations during my experience of loss– of emotion and nonverbal expression– I'm finally ready to write about it. I'm not sharing my experience of loss as such, but what I want to do here is mention some behaviours that felt noteworthy, illustrating some of the nonverbal cues that I usually write about. 

It was sudden and unexpected, so much so, that I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. Living on the other side of the world, I hadn't seen my mum for over two years. I was 'greeted' at the airport by my sister, who reluctantly stepped forth from behind her partner, his body temporarily and unknowingly shielding her from what she had to do. They were waiting right at the very back of the crowd, distancing themselves from the reality of what she was about to disclose.