13/12/2025
“The Power of Feeling Emotion: Neuroscience, Facial Expression, and Consciousness” is not merely the title of a book by Professor Dr. Freitas-Magalhães — it is the synthesis of a scientific life devoted to understanding, measuring, and respecting human emotion in its most authentic form: emotion as lived, expressed, and inscribed in the face.
Professor Freitas-Magalhães’s pioneering work has, from its earliest stages, been marked by a refusal to reduce emotion to abstract categories or mere verbal constructs. His work is grounded in a foundational principle: emotion is a neurobiological phenomenon with measurable facial expression, and the face is not an accessory of the brain, but its visible functional extension. From this premise emerges one of his most innovative contributions to contemporary neuroscience — the Facial Brain Theory.
The Facial Brain Theory
The Facial Brain Theory proposes a paradigmatic shift: the face is not merely a channel of social communication, but a peripheral neuroemotional system in which deep brain circuits — including the amygdala, insula, prefrontal cortex, and brainstem — are projected into fine, rapid, and often unconscious muscular patterns. From this perspective, emotion does not end in the brain; it continues, manifests, and becomes observable in the face. To read the face, therefore, is, in strict terms, to read the brain in emotional action.
This theory provides scientific grounding for the idea that facial expressions, including microexpressions and neuromicroexpressions, can function as neuroemotional biomarkers, opening new possibilities in clinical practice, scientific research, forensic contexts, education, and emotional artificial intelligence.
F-M FACS 6.0: A Scientific Revolution
It is within this framework that the F-M Facial Action Coding System 6.0 (F-M FACS 6.0) emerges, widely regarded as the most advanced facial coding system in the world. Going far beyond the classical FACS, F-M FACS 6.0 introduces an explicitly neuroscientific architecture, with categories such as Neural Action Units (NAUs), Neural Action Descriptors (N**s), Neural Gross Behaviours (NGBs), Neural Visibility Codes (NVCs), and Neural Voice (NVOi).
This system does not merely describe muscular movements; it integrates neural origin, temporal dynamics, and emotional function for each expressive pattern. For the first time, emotions such as pain and love are addressed with full scientific rigor as basic emotions, with their own codification, empirical validation, and clear adaptive value. F-M FACS 6.0 thus represents a true bridge between neuroscience, face, and emotion, projecting emotional science into the future.
F-M FICS 2.0 and Facial Intelligence
Complementing this work, Professor Freitas-Magalhães developed the F-M Facial Intelligence Coding System 2.0 (F-M FICS 2.0), an innovative model that introduces the concept of Facial Intelligence. This system evaluates four fundamental competencies: identification, recognition, regulation, and use of facial emotional information. In doing so, it redefines how we understand human emotional competence, shifting the focus from emotion merely felt to emotion understood, interpreted, and applied through the face.
F-M FICS 2.0 has profound implications for psychology, emotional education, leadership, clinical practice, and AI systems, demonstrating that facial literacy is an autonomous and measurable dimension of human intelligence.
Feeling, Understanding, Humanizing
“The Power of Feeling Emotion: Neuroscience, Facial Expression, and Consciousness” thus conveys both a scientific and a humanistic message. The work and legacy of Professor Dr. Freitas-Magalhães show that feeling is not a weakness, but the foundation of consciousness, empathy, and human connection. By transforming the face into a legitimate object of scientific inquiry — without ever stripping it of its human dignity — the Professor established a new field of knowledge: the neuroscience of facial expression of emotion.
His pioneering contribution lies not only in what he discovered, but in the courage to affirm that, even in the era of artificial intelligence, emotion remains profoundly human — and the face, its truest mirror.
