Zachary Tomaselli Admits He’s a Liar
Last year, Zachary Tomaselli accused Syracuse Basketball Coach Bernie Fine of molesting him when he was 13 years old. His allegations were in addition to two other individuals who came forward claiming to be victims of abuse.
Today, Tomaselli admitted that he had fabricated the whole story and that he’s a “sociopath”.
66 year old Bernie Fine was fired in late November of last year, but has maintained all of the allegations are false.
Tomaselli, 23, is set to serve three years and three months in prison for sexually abusing a teenage boy in a separate case. He had pleaded guilty to those charges.
Take a look at some videos of Tomaselli discussing his allegations to Anderson Cooper below.
Do you see anything that raises a red flag?
Talking Helps Ease Emotional Distress
Americans are a diverse group of people interacting on a daily basis often times in stressful situations.
How different are our cultural stress coping mechanisms and are they working?
The American Psychological Association, APA reports that according to UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D., the idea that putting problems into words will ease the emotional impact of those problems even across cultures.
Lieberman took this idea a step further, in 2003, by investigating it with the latest brain imaging technology (fMRIs). “There’s this idea that putting bad feelings into words can help wash worries away,” he purported.
Lieberman and his colleagues found that social rejection activates a part of the brain that is also stimulated in response to physical pain.
Interestingly, they also found that people who had relatively less activity in that area-and who reported feeling relatively less distress-had more activity in the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with verbalizing thoughts and language production.
Their study’s results which were published in Science suggest that “talking it out” can help ease a person’s emotional response to tough situations by suppressing the area of the brain that produces emotional distress.
I can almost hear groans of guys across the world who fear the words “we need to talk” but who will no longer be able to say “Nothing will come of it, or “talking never solves anything”.
On a more recent note, Lieberman and his colleagues conducted another study that will be published in Psychological Science that tests this hypothesis more directly.
They asked 30 participants to view pictures of angry, scared or happy-looking faces. Half of the time the participants tried to match the target face to another picture of a face with a similar expression. The other half of the time, they tried to match the face to a word that correctly labeled its emotion.
Using fMRI, the researchers discovered that when the participants labeled the faces’ emotions using words, they showed less activity in the amygdala-an area of the brain associated with emotional distress. At the same time, they showed more activity in the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex-the same language-related area that showed up in their previous study.
This is further evidence that verbalizing an emotion may activate the right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex, which then suppresses the areas of the brain that produce emotional pain.
What are your thoughts on this study? Does “talking it out” really help the emotional impact of a problem?
Efficacy of a Facial Affect Recognition Training Tool for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often struggle to recognize emotions from facial expressions (facial affect), hindering their social interactions.
By using Humintell’s emotion recognition training tool MiX, researchers out of Rush University Medical Center in Skokie, Illinois tested children ages 8-14 who are affected with autism spectrum disorder over a six week period.
Russo, et. al’s findings, Efficacy of a facial affect recognition training tool for children with autism spectrum disorders, were presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research in San Diego, CA this past May.
The results of their study suggests that coach-assisted computerized training with imitation exercises successfully alleviated facial affect recognition deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder.
Although future studies should investigate whether “boosters” are necessary to maintain the skill long-term, their results suggest that by using a computerized emotion recognition training program, children with autism could improve their facial expression recognition ability.
The result of this study correlates directly with another recent study that demonstrates the positive benefits of autistic children and adults using computers.
Analyzing Drew Peterson’s Facial Expressions
A former police sergeant Drew Peterson is being charged with the murder of his third wife Kathleen Savio and is a suspect in the mysterious disappearance of his fourth wife Stacy Peterson.
Peterson’s third wife’s death was originally classified as an accidental drowning (2004) but after his fourth wife Stacy vanished from their home in October 2011, investigators reopened the case and in light of new evidence and re-examining her body Peterson is being charged with Kathleen’s murder.
The Huff Post Chicago reports that The Illinois Supreme Court ordered an appellate court to reconsider if hearsay evidence, which is being disputed should be allowed.
The hearsay evidence purportedly illustrates that Peterson had a financial and emotional motive to kill Savio, according to ABC Chicago.
Watch the video below from Larry King Live:
What do you think his body language in conjunction with his words is communicating?
Do you see any “Hot Spots” (where Peterson’s nonverbal behavior contradicts what he is saying)?
Face Transplant: Update
In January of this year we shared the story of the first Full Face Transplant recipient, a Texas man, Dallas Weins who was very grateful for the life changing operation.
Reuters.com, has reported on another face transplant that has had such success that the recipient Richard Norris is able to brush his own teeth and shave!
The 37 year-old, from Virginia has a new face thanks to University of Maryland doctors. The face came from an anonymous donor whose other organs saved five patients’ lives that day.
Faces play a very important role in the social interactions of humans. They communicate so many things from our own emotional state to how we perceive others. Science and technology have advanced so fast and are now able to give agency back to victims who have lost the ability to communicate with others via the nonverbal facial expressions that most of us take for granted everyday.
For more details on Norris’ story and to see a few pictures of face transplant recipients click the link above.
The Complexity of the Human Face and Emotions
Humans learn at a very young age to distinguish faces. In fact, studies have shown that an infant will pay closer attention (i.e. stare longer) at a face than any other object, no matter how colorful.
The human face plays an important role when answering the question what is it that makes humans different from all other animals?
Many scientists remark that humans have the most expressive face on the planet.
ABC News reports that this probably played a role in the previously accepted idea that we are the most emotional complex animals simply because scientists could not see such expressive emotions in other species.
The article goes on to point out that no other species has evolved the intricate web of facial nerves that we humans have or have the eloquence of the movement of 52 separate facial muscles.
So, the complexity of the human face is unique and allows for diverse and complex emotional facial expressions. But are we the only species that have such deep emotional responses to our environments?
Scientist Jaak Panksepp, set out to answer that question in his lab at Washington State University. His species of choice, no surprise, rats.
This field of study is relatively new and is coined “Affective Neuroscience”, which traces the pathways of feelings and moods, conscious and unconscious, in brains, nerves and behavior in many species, including us.
What he and his colleagues found was that when tickled, rats emit a high pitched giggling. They would also follow the hand that “tickled” them around seeming to want more further suggesting that the act of being “tickled” was enjoyable. They do seem to be responding emotionally to stimuli in their environments.
However, unlike the seven universal facial expressions of emotion, we cannot expect our facial expressions to be universal across species. Therefore, what we might interpret on a chimpanzee as joy could in fact be an expression of fear.
In a connection to a recent blog, posted on the 26th of this month, this article went on to report that the famous and brilliant Jane Goodall also suffered from Prosopagnosia, a difficulty in face recognition.
Read the entire article to find out more information on the human face and one reason why men have evolved to have big bushy beards while women have remained, for the most part, free of facial hair.
Spotting the Facial Expression of Emotion
Can you spot the emotion that occurs in the video below at around 5:18? What do you make of her response?
Share your thoughts in the comments section above!
Thanks to our affiliate Nicolas Fradet for the video idea!
Your Questions Answered By Dr. Matsumoto Part 5!
Thank to you everyone for your overwhelming response to the “Submit your questions to Dr. Matsumoto” post on March 16th. Here are a few questions and answers by Dr. Matsumoto himself!
You can find out more about Dr. Matsumoto and his research at his website
You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of the series by clicking on the appropriate links.
Q1. Adam L: Why is there no Action Unit #3 in F.A.C.S.? And what does AU #42 mean?
Hey Adam. Actually AU3 exists in BabyFACS, a FACS that is adapted for baby faces. The adult version of that is AU4, but it is left out in the adult FACS because that muscle doesn’t move independently of AU4 in adults. But it exists in kids. I am not sure of any studies that identify the meaning of AU42. I know it has been identified in studies of sleepiness or pain.
Q2. Kyle Stark: Have you noticed any difference in an athlete’s performance when displaying fear nonverbal communication displays such as macro face expressions vs more confident non verbal communication?
Not really. Sometimes I see fear or sadness on an athlete’s face right before competition, but then they turn out just fine in competition. So I began to think that different athletes have different emotions that help prep them for peak performance. Now if you see too much fear or sadness way before competition, like days or months before, that’s not good.
Q3. Oliver Lane: Do you find any, inspiration or any theories and ideas, from Dale Carnegie’s book “How to win friends and influence people”?
I am not an expert on that book, but know it cursorily. Based on that cursory knowledge I think many of the main principles about the importance of relationships and expressivity are right on and still applicable even today. Maybe especially today.
Q4. Juan Pablo García says: What is your scientific opinion on the physiognomy?
Sorry this question doesn’t make sense to me. If you can you be more specific, I can answer it in the comments section.
Q5. Tim Bubb says: My sociology teacher and I have frequently debated on whether there are any innate parts of nonverbal communication and body language. She is a social constructionist and my belief is that some of it is innate but the vast majority is socialized. I was wondering could you shed some light on that debate?
It is clear to me that facial expressions of emotion, and the physiological emotion system in general, is biologically innate. There are many sources of evidence for this, perhaps the strongest of which are studies of congenitally blind individuals, which cannot be explained by social construction.
Q6. Cristobal says: What is the best way to increase your non verbal awareness? Or to say it another way, to increase your mastery in body language?
Keep practicing, noting behaviors and especially anomalies, and try to find sources that can teach you how to interpret them correctly. There is a growing scientific literature on all of these.
Here’s a blog article that may interest you: Hot Spotting: Practice Makes Perfect
Q7. Tiffany S. says: Do psychopaths have ability to show universal emotions, as we know microexpressions to be? Are they more likely to know when to mimic ‘right’ emotions and mask ‘wrong’ emotions. Are they easier to read in an interview or harder, utilizing microexpression training?
I know of no scientific study of psychopaths and their emotional expressions. However, I have done some reading on psychopaths and have talked to some experts in this field. Based on that I don’t believe that anything about expressions is any different with the psychopaths. Now, they are very different about what events they get emotional about, which is not normal.
Q8. Dan S. says: Why are some FACS codes in parentheses? What does this signify?
Hmm…which ones are you referring to?
Q9. WC says: In your opinion what kind of jobs could you best use this material in aside from the obvious TSA and law enforcement fields?
I would say anything involving face to face interactions. Physicians, lawyers, poker players, therapists, sales, negotiators, etc
Emotions and Sports
Kids across the country are competing at higher and higher levels in sports, in and out of school. Being a part of a team is great for learning socializing skills and physical activity is good for the body, but are sports emotionally healthy for kids?
For many kids the adolescent and teenage years are physiologically devoted to growth both mentally as well as physically. How do sports play into the growth of America’s youth?
Youth sports have long been hailed for their physical as well as emotional benefits by many doctors, and cross training is being endorsed more and more.
The question is, are there negative emotional effects from playing sports?
Canada.com has reported on the emotional impacts of concussions on young athletes and how many doctors and parents overlook the possible long term effects of what sometimes seem to be harmless head bumps.
Anxiety and depression or sometimes-profound personality changes can be the direct result of a concussion.
Dr. Shree Bhalerao, an associate professor at the University of Toronto and Department of Psychiatry at St. Michael’s Hospital, who specializes in traumatic brain injury deals with patients who suffer the effects of head trauma even years after the actual event.
Dr. Bhalerao suggests that too much focus in head traumas is on the physical injury itself and not enough attention is paid to the emotional effects such as depression, anxiety, headaches, lack of concentration, and sadness.
Bhalerao uses the metaphor of a globe to delineate the effects of a head trauma, “You can shake the globe, but all the parts don’t settle in the same way. A huge part (of concussions) is the psychological piece.”
Concussions are caused by a direct hit to the head, neck or face, or by a blow anywhere else on that body that transmits sufficient force to the head. With a blow to the head, the brain is shaken in the skull, triggering an inflammatory response that can damage or irreversibly destroy brain cells.
Most sensitive is the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that’s responsible for memory, emotion, reasoning, judgment and empathy. Therefore, people who have suffered a head injury can lose the ability to control their emotions, says Bhalerao.
He goes on to state that it’s crucial that anyone who starts experiencing emotional or thinking problems after a concussion see a doctor.
“My biggest wish is that more people were aware of this,” he said.
What are your thoughts on head injuries in general?
What about concussions? Are they dangerous even if the injury itself seems harmless?
Prosopagnosia (Face Blindness)
Most of us recognize people we know by looking at their faces. It seems to be an automatic inherent brain function.
But what if you couldn’t delineate between people based on their faces? There are some people who simply cannot distinguish between faces even those of loved ones such as a husband, wife, son or daughter.
Lesley Stahl and 60 Minutes reports on “face blindness”, a neurological disorder where people cannot recognize faces. In a few extreme cases face blind people can’t even recognize their own face. There seems to be varying degrees to this disorder, whose scientific term is prosopagnosia, but the effects can be devastating for all sufferers.
Imagine a world where your children and even your spouse look like strangers. It is hard to imagine yet normal functioning brains, like most of us have, encounter a similar problem recognizing faces including those of loved ones if pictures showing only the faces (not hair) are turned upside down. This begs the question why is there this similarity and what part of the brain is responsible for facial recognition.
Science has not been able to concretely say what areas of the brain are exclusively dedicated to face processing. But they do know that there are two sides to this spectrum. There are the sufferers of “face blindness” as mentioned above and there are a very few of us who find it difficult to NOT recognize a face even if they only encountered it briefly years ago. The latter are dubbed “super recognizers”.
The short video below shows you the extremes of “face blindness”.
For science, facial recognition proposes a very difficult problem for the simple reason that all faces are basically the same.
In her report, Stahl reports that face blindness sufferers cannot recognize or identify faces– even those of their children or spouses. She also reveals that many people don’t even know they have the condition.
Dr. Matsumoto comments on the 60 minute special, “I thought it was interesting. However, I was surprised to hear her [Lesley Stahl] say most of the medical world didn’t know about prosopagnosia because I have seen it studied all my career. My hypothesis is that it’s probably caused by something organic in the area that governs facial identity, which appears to be different than the areas related to expression recognition.”
It is important, Dr. Matsumoto points out, to understand that there is a big difference between facial recognition and facial expression recognition. Facial recognition is the recognition of faces, where facial expression recognition includes being able to recognize expressions of emotion such as microexpressions.
Test your facial recognition skills with the video below.
To see the entire 2 -part series on prosopagnosia click here.
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