The Claim That The Face Does Not Express Desire

Ngo, Hood, Martin, Painter, Smith & Zappavigna (2022: 152, 156):

The possibility of different paralinguistic resources being instantiated simultaneously allows us to infer meanings not necessarily interpretable from an expression in a single paralinguistic mode. For example, FACIAL AFFECT has no distinct option for the expression of desire. However, when raised eyebrows and wide-opened eyes (realising FACIAL AFFECT as [surprise]) are expressed convergently with PARALINGUISTIC PROXIMITY as [personal] and PARALINGUISTIC ORIENTATION as [involved], the emotion of desire is strongly invoked. Two such instances are described in (29).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a serious omission in the authors' model. The bodily expression of desire is enshrined in Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look

and at least one of the following facial expressions might reasonably be construed as expressing desire:

[2] To be clear, the authors' claim here is that a personal, involved expression of surprise "invokes" (i.e. evokes) an expression of desire. In contrast, none of the desiring faces above look at all surprised.