Our personal experiences as children play an important role in shaping the way we read and interpret faces later in life (Fox, Levitt, & Nelson, 2010). This type of facial discrimination has become so second nature that we may forget this skill once had to be learned, developed, and practiced. On a basic level, when a person smiles we know we made them happy and when they look angry we may have offended them.
Much of our daily, personal interactions are based on how we interpret the facial expressions of people we meet.