I just finished The Craft of Interviewing by John Brady, and as it often happens, it's not the practical advices that are most interesting, but the spirit, the philosophy of the vocation.

We Americans like interview so much that we create them. Daniel Boorstin has called the interview a "pseudo-event," artificial news, in which things happen not of their own volition -- as do fires, floods, acts of God and rage -- but of our volition. ...

"Sometimes I think it's another sign of the sad necessity of our crowded, lonely lives," suggests George Garrett, "an urgent, hopeless reaching out to touch something real, a deep hunger for something authentic when everything else seem false, a desire to believe at least in the possibility of the naked truth."

Interviewing is, above all, the unexpected. Its joy is not unlike what Gloria Steinem once said of writing in general: "It's the only thing that passes the three tests of métier: 1) When I am doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead; 2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and 3) it's frightening."

I wrote in Online mind reading entry, "Neither facial expressions nor intonations are universal among cultures, or, rather, only most basic are, while subtleties are lost on newcomers." The next day reading George Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" I was pleased to stumble across the following statement:

In research spanning more than two decades, Paul Ekman and his associates studied in detail the physiological correlates of emotions [...]. In a major crosscultural study of facial gestures expressing emotions, Ekman and his associates discovered that there were basic emotions that seem to correlate universally with facial gestures: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and interest. Of all the subtle emotions that people feel and have words and concepts for around he world, only these have consistent correlates in facial expressions across cultures.

It's always a joy to find out that there is some scientific research that proves your sudden insights, if even later it will turn out you both were wrong. :)

Back to facial gestures expressing emotions. Besides different ways to express emotions, there seem to be different defaults on what emotions and how much of them to express. I found my Japanese friend's emotions particularly difficult to read: there was nothing on her face that would provide a clue. Is this how the notion of "Inscrutable Oriental" was born? On contrast, American prosodies sounded exhagerrated and unnatural to my ear, especially when performed by females, making me to think about my interlocutors as insincere. Now I think about them more as "efforts saving" rather then "insincere".