Schlicht and his team asked participants to make “risky” choices while simultaneously being presented with opponents whose faces “differentially correlated with subjective impressions of trust”. In short, participants were forced to make difficult decisions while seeing a face that was either untrustworthy, neutral or trustworthy.

But what exactly is an untrustworthy or trustworthy face?

According to research out of Princeton University, a trustworthy face looks like this:

Credit: Oosterhof & Todorov

The expression seems to have a slight smile and the eyebrows turned slightly up.

By using an expression simliar to the one shown above, Schlicht and his team of researchers found that ”threatening face information has little influence on wagering behavior, but faces relaying positive emotional characteristics impact people’s decisions”.

According to the abstract of the study, Schlicht concluded that “the best “poker face” for bluffing may not be a neutral face, but rather a face that contains emotional correlates of trustworthiness”.

The study which was published on July 21, 2010 in PLoS One is titled “Human Wagering Behavior Depends on Opponent’s Faces”.

The complete article can be found here.

Complete information regarding Princeton’s study of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces can be found here.

New facial expression recognition software helps employees measure their own smiles based on a mathematical scale. This technology has endless potential and could be used in a wide variety of professions, especially for those that interact with individuals on a face to face basis.

In fact, several researchers have suggested that facial expressions affect your mood.

An article in Time Magazine from last year described the work of researcher Marsha Linehan, a University of Washington psychologist who treats suicidal patients. Through her research, Linehan found that “helping patients modulate their facial expressions — relaxing the face when angry, for instance — can help them control their emotions”.

Several other researchers have investigated the positive effects of smiling, such as making you more attractive and lifting your spirits. Smiling has also been proven to help build rapport and create positive relationships with others.

The study, which was the first of its kind, studied congenitally blind (blind from birth)  and sighted judo athletes at the 2004 Paralympic Games and the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece.

Their journal article entitled “Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion of Congenitally and Noncongenitally Blind Individuals” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009.

During the course of the study, more than 4,800 photographs were captured and analyzed, including images of athletes from 23 countries. According to the findings, there were “no differences between congenitally blind, noncongenitally blind, and sighted athletes, either on the level of individual facial actions or in facial emotion configurations”. This meant that the blind and sighted athletes produced the exact same facial expression, firing the exact same muscles at exactly the same time in similar situations.

For example, below are images of women who had just lost a medal match. The woman on the left is the non-sighted athlete and the woman on the right is the sighted athlete. As you can see, the expressions are both of sadness. The brows are drawn up and together in both pictures, indicating sadness.

These findings “provide compelling evidence that the production of spontaneous facial expressions of emotion is not dependent on observational learning but simultaneously demonstrates a learned component to the social management of expressions, even among blind individuals”.

In essence, facial expressions of emotion are hardwired into our genes and are not learned culturally.

“Losers pushed their lower lip up as if to control the emotion on their face and many produced social smiles,” Matsumoto said. “Individuals blind from birth could not have learned to control their emotions in this way through visual learning so there must be another mechanism. It could be that our emotions, and the systems to regulate them, are vestiges of our evolutionary ancestry. It’s possible that in response to negative emotions, humans have developed a system that closes the mouth so that they are prevented from yelling, biting or throwing insults”.

References:

San Francisco State University (2008, December 30). Facial Expressions Of Emotion Are Innate, Not Learned. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August 17, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/12/081229080859.htm

You have to give Dr. Phil some credit because some of the information he presents is in fact, true. One point that he makes early on in the video is that there is little or no research to support the idea that eye contact (or lack of) has anything to do with deception. This is true.

Back in September of last year, we talked to deception expert Dr. Mark Frank who stated that eye contact (or lack of) is “one of the most misunderstood aspects of deception”. According to Dr. Frank, there have been over 30 studies that have studied eye gaze and its correlation to deception and most of them showed no evidence of a linkage between the two. In fact, other studies have investigated this as well. The complete blog article can be found here.

Dr. Phil also touches on “baselining” someone- or noticing deviations from normal behavior. Dr. Matsumoto agrees that baselining an individual is extremely important- but not as easy as some people think. The quickest and most accurate way to establish a baseline has a lot to do with the context and exact situation you are in. Is it a dinner party with close friends or an interrogation at a police station? Depending on the scenario, the quickest way to establish a baseline will differ drastically.

In addition to these tips, Dr. Phil suggests the following: that liars are over emphatic, don’t use contractions, don’t use personal pronouns, repeat themselves frequently and are too rehearsed. While these tips could be useful in certain situations, they are not always a guarantee that someone is lying. Each situation and each person is different. What’s important to keep in mind is that there is no Pinnochio response when it comes to telling lies.

The cues to deception occur in verbal and nonverbal channels such as verbal style, voice, gestures, verbal content and facial expressions of emotions. Still in all, because the face is the most important signal system we have, we believe (and the research bears this out) that microexpressions and subtle expressions are the key to helping people evaluate truthfulness.

Thus, learning how to rea facial expressions of emotion as well as micro and subtle expressions is one of the most important step in learning how to detect deception in others.

The study which was conducted by researchers Katie Douglas and Professor Richard Porter of the University of Otago in New Zealand, asked 68 individuals suffering from severe depression to participate in a facial expression recognition study.The individuals were shown a total of 96 faces expressing 5 different emotions: anger, sadness, fear, disgust and happiness. They also were shown a series of neutral facial expressions. Their ability to label these expressions were compared to the ability of a control group comprised of 50 healthy individuals

According to the abstract of the study, “A negative interpretation bias was observed in the depression group: neutral faces were more likely to be interpreted as sad and less likely to be interpreted as happy, compared with controls. The depression group also displayed a specific deficit in the recognition of facial expressions of disgust, compared with controls”.

In sum, the researchers found that the healthy control group was much better at recognizing facial expressions of disgust compared to the severely depressed individuals.

Professor Porter suggests in an article written by the University of Otago that there may be various reasons as to why individuals suffering from depression have difficulty recognizing disgust. He suggests that it is possible that the ability to recognize disgust may be correlated with dopamine dysfunction. Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that had many functions. Dopamine plays important roles in behavior and cognition, voluntary movement, motivation, punishment and reward. 

Professor Porter also suggests that when individuals are severely depressed, their ability to process emotions is affected, perhaps affecting their ability to recognize certain emotions.

Douglas and Porter’s findings are both interesting and informative. Their study was funded by the Tertiary Education Commission’s Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship.

The average accuracy rate for an individual to detect truths from lies is around 53%, which is essentially is no better than chance. However, there are some individuals that demonstrate the ability to detect lies at a much higher accuracy rate than others.

In the Wizards Project conducted by Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan and Dr. Paul Ekman, the researchers tested over 20,000 individuals in their ability to detect lies. Of these, only around 50 individuals had an accuracy rate of 80% or higher. These individuals were subsequently dubbed “truth wizards”. Surprisingly in the study, truth wizards came from all walks of life and did not necessarily from a law enforcement background. Eyes for Lies, one of the truth wizards discovered through the wizards project, writes a popular blog which attracts hundreds of followers from around the world.

In the Police Lie Detection Accuracy study published in the Journal of Law and Human Behavior, Dr. O’Sullivan and Dr. Frank investigated across 23 studies involving 31 different police groups in eight countries. Officers who were tested with lie detection scenarios using high stakes lies were “significantly more accurate than law enforcement officials tested with low stakes lies”.

The study differentiates high stakes lies from low stakes lies in the following way: “In high stakes lies, the liars are lying about something important to them such as a strongly held opinion, a personally highly stressful event, whether they committed a serious crime, or whether they are actually emotionally aroused at the present moment (as opposed to recalling an emotional event)”.

The abstract and preview of the article can be found here

Vrij, a professor of applied social psychology, has written over 350 articles and book chapters mainly on the topics of nonverbal and verbal cues to deception and lie detection.

The article, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2004 investigated ninety-nine police officers and their ability to detect lies.

The study was unique in that it tested officers’ ability detect lies in a realistic setting during real police interviews with suspects, rather than in a laboratory where participants are brought in and instructed to lie.

Unlike other previous studies, Mann and her team found that the police officer’s “accuracy rates were higher than typically found in deception research and reached levels similar to those obtained by specialized lie detectors in previous research”.

In addition, their accuracy rates were “positively correlated with perceived experience in interviewing suspects and with mentioning cues to detecting deceit that relate to a suspect’s story”. In addition, as with many other studies, accuracy rates were negatively correlated with nonverbal cues such as gaze aversion and fidgeting.

The complete article can be found here

For his doctoral thesis at Umea University in Sweden, Shafiq ur Rehman developed a new tool that converts facial emotions into special tactile sensations for the visually impaired.

Rehman’s study is based on the idea that much of communication (up to 90%) is communicated non-verbally and that facial expressions of emotion are one of the most complex signal systems that we have as humans. Other recent studies have suggested that people also imitate other people to interpret their emotions. Because individuals who are visually impaired are not able to see facial expressions, this can create “barriers to social interactions”.

To allow visually impaired individuals to “see” emotions, Rehman and his team have developed a new technology “based on an ordinary web camera, hardware and a tactile display”. Using the webcam to capture certain facial expressions on the face, the hardware converts the emotion into a series of vibrational patters that correspond with the expressed emotion.

The project was funded by the Swedish Research Council and its main focus has been to characterize different emotions and to “find a way to present them by means of advanced biomedical engineering and computer vision technologies”.

Rehman’s complete article, entitled “Vibrotactile Rendering of Human Emotions on the Manifold of Facial Expressions” can be found by clicking here

Basic emotions are emotions that have been scientifically proven to have a certain facial expression associated with it.

For example, the basic emotion of “Anger” can be recognized by this picture all around the world, no matter what age, religion or gender you are, or what language you speak. Anger can be characterized by these characteristics below:

Similarly, Fear is also a basic emotion. Fear is recognized all around the world by this facial expression of emotion, with the characteristics which can be seen below. Its important to note that other words describing fear are also expressed by this same face (or portions of this face). Emotions such as scared, mortified, horrified and petrified all have characteristics of this expression.

There are other basic emotions such as disgust, contempt, happiness,  sadness and surprise. Their characteristics can be seen below:

We often get asked about emotions such as shame, pride, jealously and guilt. While these emotions are important ones, they are still not considered part of the basic emotions set. For example, there is no scientific evidence showing that there is a universal expression of shame that is recognized around the world as shame. Be weary when you see or hear people labeling expressions as emotions not in the basic emotion set. There is little evidence backing up their claims.

*Please note that the images used in this blog post are property of Humintell. Duplicating or using these images are any purpose is strictly prohibited without written consent of Humintell.

1. If someone isn’t looking you in the eye, they’re lying

THE FACTS: Eye gaze is the biggest misconception about liars. A study was conducted by over 90 scientists who examined over 5,000 people in 75 countries and what they believe about liars. The number one answer across all cultures was the (false) belief that liars will not look you in the eye. However, there have been over 30 studies that examined eye contact as a variable when lying and most of them have shown that there is no tell-tale sign when someone is being deceptive.

2. If someone is fidgeting they’re lying

THE FACTS: Shifty eyes of fidgety feet are not sure signs of lying. The person could simply be uncomfortable or nervous. In most high stakes situations where there are stakes are high, to be fidgety and nervous is quite normal. Its important to pay attention when a behavior deviates from that person’s normal behavior. When you find them start doing something they don’t normally do, that is when you need to start paying closer attention.

3. If someone touches their face or rubs their nose when they’re talking to you, they’re lying

THE FACTS: An extremely common misconception about liars if that they touch their face or rub their nose when lying. Just like fidgety hands or feet, this one isolated behavior can’t determine if someone is lying across all people in all situations.