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On Dec. 12th a Canadian court official, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, ruled that Muslim women must remove their face covering such as the burka or niqab before reciting the Canadian oath of citizenship.

cbcnews Canada describes how the decisions regarding head dressings is effecting Canada’s  entire legal system.

An Ontario woman, whose name has been withheld, is waiting to hear if she can testify in a case with her niqab.  She is the complainant in a sexual assault case. The defending lawyers say that they want to and should be allowed to see her facial expressions.

Do you agree or disagree that she should be allowed to testify with her face veil?

In Quebec there is a “reasonable accommodation”  debate going on regarding face veils.  A woman was barred this past summer from being a Lac St. Louis Regional Soccer Association referee simply because she wears a niqab.

Read the rest of the article to see how this controversy is affecting other countries as well.

Have you ever wondered, How did he/she get the promotion over me (I have more education or experience)? Why do I always get the customer support person who seems rude?

Well, auburnpub.com reports that children’s social skills are critical to their happiness and success in life.  This comes from Daniel Coleman’s book Emotional Intelligence.

So what are the key elements to keep in mind when trying to raise emotionally intelligent children?  Here is an abbreviated version of the top 5 pointers.

1.  Empathize with your child.

Number 2 is a big one and I imagine a bit controversial for some parents.

2.  Don’t force toddlers to share.  Instead us the concept of taking turns.

3.  Before play dates let your child put away ‘special” toys that they do not want to share.

4. Set clear limits on physically acting out.  Teach healthy self-management

5.  Labeling emotion is the first step in managing it. Ex:  That sound is scary but your safe here in the house.

To read more about tips on emotional intelligence click here.

“This [study] shows infants will imitate behavior from a reliable adult,” says second author Ivy Brooker, “In contrast, the same behavior performed by an unreliable adult is interpreted as irrational or inefficient, therefore not worth imitating.”

The babies were divided in two groups; with reliable or unreliable testers.  To determine the reliability of experimenters they looked into a container with a reaction of excitement.  Then the infants were invited to discover if the container actually had a toy in it or was empty.

The follow up experiment then had the experimenter use their forehead in lieu of their hands to turn on a light.  The researchers recorded whether the infants would imitate the experimenter.  The study findings, only 34% of infants of unreliable testers followed the strange assignment.

“Like older children, infants keep track of an individual’s history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to guide their subsequent learning,” says senior researcher Diane Poulin-Dubois.

Worldcrunch has reported that a British research team, from the University of Durham, confirms that babies develop the muscle mechanisms to smile before they are born.  This would mean that smiling and perhaps laughter as they claim are innate human responses and not learned behaviors.

The research published in PloS ONE journal affirms that several facial movements beginning in the second trimester enable the formation of all the elements of laughter around the 30th week of pregnancy.

This strongly suggests that the smile observed by researchers is not a reflexive response mimicking a human but rather of an independent action.  This is further supported by certain forms of brain damage where a smile can occur without reason demonstrating that it is more of a reflex than a social signal of emotion.

Dr. Matsumoto also comments on the ability of blind athletes to demonstrate facial expressions of emotion such as joy (smiling) and sadness, which is a strong indicator that these are inherent human reactions.

Researcher Nadja Reissland stated, “The movements of the face were spontaneous and could not have been triggered by the ultrasound because the babies were probably not even aware of it.  In order to exclude any possibility of external influence we decided to take this approach rather then studying pre-term babies.”

An analysis of the babies’ facial movements was made using American psychologist Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Encoding System, which allowed researchers to characterize the expressions linked to laughing and crying.

Rui Diogo, a specialist in facial muscles in the anthropology department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. says the expression of a smile remains the essence of man because among the six pairs of muscles that produce a smile, that of the risorius, which pulls the corner of the mouth outwards, is specific to human beings.

parentalcentral.ca has also added some very interesting 4-D images of babies’ facial muscle movements in utero that support these research findings.

Like crying, smiling is a primary way of establishing a link with one’s surroundings and could be a vital element retained by evolution so that a baby can form attachments with those around him or her.

Reissland would like to do a postnatal follow-up to see how the baby’s development matches the facial development in utero and whether that extra attachment in the last trimester helps the parents’ attachment and anxiety levels.

What are your thoughts on laughter and smiling as inherent human qualities?

Do you think having these characteristics as innate responses is a beneficial evolutionary trait or is insignificant?

The brain’s capacity to find and recognize faces is vast.  Is your brain in tip top shape?

Take a look at this short and interesting video on our brain and how and why we recognize faces. Thanks to 1000searches for the video!

Well, the Internet is no exception to the fallibility of human beings.  According to ScienceBlog, The University of Massachusetts says that the written word has no shield against the daily deception of humans.

As a matter of fact, we lie even more in emails and texts than in person.  At least that is what Robert S. Feldman, professor of psychology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Mattityahu Zimbler, a graduate student, published in the October issue of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

The researchers studied 110 pairs of college students and found that there is deception in all three forms of communication but it increases with our technological advancements of instant messaging and e-mail.

Why is it more prevalent to lie in cyber space than to the person right next o you?

The researches both agree that, “It seems likely that the asynchronicity of e-mail makes the users feel even more disconnected from the respondent in that a reply to their queries is not expected immediately, but rather is delayed until some future point in time.”

“Ultimately, the findings show how easy it is to lie when online, and that we are more likely to be the recipient of deceptive statements in online communication than when interacting with others face-to-face,” says Feldman.

New research has discovered why children with these social disorders have difficulty in recognizing and processing facial expressions of emotions such as anger, sadness and happiness.  The findings were recently revealed at the Society for Neuroscience; and, according to the examiner.com and US News Health, they suggest that it is the lack of eye contact that triggers children’s  inability to correctly recognize faces and facial expressions.

Pilyoung Kim from the National Institute of Mental Health found that children with social disorders such as bipolar focus more on the nose and mouth region of a person’s face rather than the eyes, which is the focus of their healthy counterparts.  Kim suggests that treatment programs that get children to focus on the eyes  to identify emotions would be most beneficial.

In a previous blog “Virtual Emotions and Autism“, we reported that new technology was being developed via video games to help children with social disorders such as these to recognize facial expressions of emotion.  The ability to recognize or not recognize facial expressions of emotion affects a person’s ability to interact socially to the world around them.

“If such training helps children to process the emotional information in the world more accurately, that may in turn increase their ability to regulate their emotional reactions to social situations,” purports Kim.

Scientist are now focusing on how we convey information and io9 evolution writes that how we make the sounds of language – which of course primarily happens in our voice boxes – is less important than how we convey meanings.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute purport that the gesture theory of language evolution suggests that the complex spoken languages we use today originate from relatively simple ideas our ancestors conveyed with their hands.

Their research found that all four of these species (of apes) develop a complex system of hand-waving and gestures in the first twenty months of life. These range from simply poking other apes to get their attention to slightly more abstract gestures like shaking their heads or extending their arms outward.

The fact that their young can and do pick these up shows that it is a way for them to convey meaningful information.

Researcher Michael Collins notes, “In monkeys, intentional arm movements are dedicated mainly to grasping. Communicative gestures probably emerged in apes, and began to assume grammatical forms in hominins.”

Another important fact to consider is that human babies learn the same basic gestures across cultures regardless of where they are raised.  Apes, however,  did not show common meanings for gestures across or within species.  The only commonality was that they used hand gestures in sophisticated ways from a young age.

Science has been progressing on robot’s ability to express facial expressions of emotions but recognizing them is an entirely different trial.  Researchers from the University of Tsukuba, Japan have created a method of teaching robots via facial expressions.

Young children learn about social norms and a large part of acceptable behaviors through nonverbal communication and the environment around them.  They also learn if something is accepted or rejected through simple expressions such as a smile or a frown.  Researchers are hoping to apply the same ideology to a robot and influence its actions using the very same methods.

The Verge reports that this new technology uses wireless electromyography (EMG) head band, which can accurately read smiles and frowns 97 percent of the time.

Does that sound too good to be true?

Check out the video below and decide for yourself as a scientist and a robot interact via facial expressions a frown or a smile to be exact.

Click here to view the embedded video.