Over time, most law enforcement personnel who regularly interview suspects or victims develop their own personal techniques to interpret the various facial expressions of the person they are questioning. Facial tics or shifting eyes can often give away more information than the person being interviewed intends to reveal.

Glenna Trout, a former Bellevue, Washington, police and training officer, has taken that premise one step further by using "face reading" to gain insights into an individual's strengths and beliefs as well as to illicit information they may not willingly share. The retired patrol lieutenant and field training officer has studied face reading for more than 20 years and now devotes her time and energy to conducting courses on the subject for law enforcement officials around the world.

According to Trout, the face carries the majority of all information a person transmits. By using the "tools" she has developed, Trout shows students in her introductory workshops how to recognize and "read" many aspects of a person's face - including personality styles, life experiences, underlying beliefs, attitudes and health issues.

Much of what she teaches in her courses has little to do with genetic traits, such as eye color or freckles, but with interpreting an individual's experiences, attitudes and belief systems.

"We each form specific thought patterns and make essential decisions of our 'self' based on our earliest experiences," says Trout. "This information becomes imprinted on our face through the body building process of various facial muscles, which pull or push our facial features into recognizable alignments or characteristics.

"Experiences from this time of our lives are usually forgotten at the conscious level, but are remembered in the subconscious," she adds. "Most of us will spend the rest of our lives acting on these decisions without ever evaluating them, which then results in our attitudes becoming even more pronounced and visible on our faces as we age."

By using face reading techniques, Trout says it is possible to learn to recognize the masks people wear, to see behind the facades and to gain a deeper understanding of why the individual thinks, feels and acts as he/she does. This ability, Trout explains, can lead to improved communication and observation skills through a deeper understanding of individual belief and behavior patterns. Such training can also expand an officer's interview and interrogation abilities, she says, adding studies have shown emotions are expressed on the face the same way cross-culturally.

Her research has shown emotional expressions can "scroll" across a face at a rate of 64 per second, and that it is possible to learn to "freeze frame" the sequences of emotions revealed on a person's face and develop an approximation of what they choose to show us.

"There are seven basic biologically built-in emotional expressions on the face: joy, anger, sadness, disgust, contentment, fear and surprise," Trout explains. "Learning to recognize these emotional 'legos' and being aware of the complex combinations of emotions as they scroll across the face will provide tremendous insights into such things as how an individual feels about life in general, their current situation and their attitude toward others.

"You can learn to recognize the underlying emotional canvas (longstanding or deep-seated emotions), how that canvas differs from more transient emotions, and what this all means in the message the individual is communicating to you," she adds.

Face mapping
One face reading method Trout uses is called "face mapping."

A face, or photo of a face, can give an overview of the subject as a person - their life pattern and where they are going in life. The face is then divided into nine sections, which makes it possible to gain a deeper understanding of a person's life experience.

"The information contained (on a face) is hugely complex," she comments. "This is why a nine-segment division of the face is utilized. It allows you to 'chunk' the information in such a way as to make the person come to life in an understandable and compassionate manner.

"However, even at that, each section contains at least six different kinds of information and that makes for a total of 54 components of the face that we have to study. These nine sections and six types of information still make the face far more comprehensible than taking it on as an organic whole, at least initially."

Taken individually, each of the nine sections represents a personality aspect. The right side of the mouth illustrates a person's social impact system, or how they elicit what they want from people. The left side of the mouth shows social orientation, what a person expects from or feels about other people. Taken together, the full mouth demonstrates social interface, how someone is seen by others - their persona or style. The right eye expresses a person's world view, what they expect from the world and what they see around them. The left eye is the self view, how they see themselves in the world - self-perception and their lot in life. Taken together, the eyes show life experience and their evaluation of that life.

Mirror images
Using "mirror images" is another method Trout employs to read a face. A full-face view is used as a basis, then individual mirror images are made of the left and right sides to show full views of each.

The full-face view gives an overview of the person - where they have come from, where they are now and where they are heading. A mirror image of the right face is the public, or projected, self a person shows to the world and the left side mirror image shows a person's real self.

When both sides of the face look similar, or congruent, that individual's behavior is usually expected to be more consistent in a variety of settings than when there is a noticeable difference between the two sides of the face Noticeable differences between the two views can, sometimes dramatically, illustrate the difference between a person's "real" self and the self they reveal to the world.

As a police officer herself, Trout was skeptical when she was first introduced to the concept of face reading at a college class in the mid-1980s, but she says she quickly became fascinated by the subject. "By the end of the evening I had hundreds of questions and was inspired by all the applications I perceived would be possible with this knowledge," she remembers.

She then took courses offered through Lake Washington VocTech and at the Khalsa Health Center in Seattle, Washington, becoming proficient enough to teach classes on her own. She also studied under Oregon psychologist Narayan Singh Khalsa and added to her knowledge by researching the work of psychologist Paul Elkman. In addition, she investigated the fields of macrobiotics, kinesiology and neuro-linguistics to broaden her knowledge of the human anatomy.

Retiring to a new career Trout retired from the Belleview Police Department in 1993, married then-British police officer John Bishop, and moved to the east coast of England.

"When I moved to England I didn't have any intention of doing anything, professionally, with face reading," Trout recalls. But her ability to identify potential troublemakers on the videotapes of local soccer crowds, generated interest on behalf of the Ipswich (England) Police Department and her international speaking and training career grew from there.

Since then, she has traveled extensively, conducting training seminars and conference workshops throughout the United States, Canada, Britain and Europe for law enforcement personnel, arson investigators and in the private sector.

As a result of courses she conducted in Belgium, the Antwerp Police Department has implemented face reading as one of the tools of investigation for its detectives. One of the officers she taught in Antwerp now teaches seminars on the subject at the Advanced Investigations School in Brussels.

She has also trained members of Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), been a member of the United Kingdom Association of the Chief Police Officer's Violence Against the Person committee and served on the Metropolitan Police "Domestic Violence Through to Murder" Working Group at Scotland Yard.

"I appreciate teaching police officers," Trout says. "They may be skeptical when they first attend a training session, but are usually much more open-minded when they leave."

Trout recently introduced a new distance course to her Web site, (www.simple-web-solutions. com/newface/) where lessons are individualized and students can work at their own pace to learn face reading skills. And, she has expanded her client list to include practitioners of the healing arts and domestic violence prevention.

She is also working on a book on the subject. "Not just a 'how to' book, but one that also explains the 'why's' of face reading," says Trout. "Face reading can be a fabulous tool, but it needs to be used with compassion. It shouldn't be used in a negative way - to harm or ridicule.

"When reading a person's face, it is crucial you approach the task in an empathic and caring manner," she concludes. "This is a human being with a life history, feelings, personality and destiny who requires a caring understanding. The whole point of the undertaking is to come from compassionate comprehensions. The key to the approach is to respect the integrity and needs of the person and of the situation for which you are doing the reading."