Facial Expressions in Dharun Ravi Verdict
Many of you have likely heard the story of former Rutger’s student Dharun Ravi.
Ravi, 20, was recently found guilty of a hate crime today for using a webcam to spy on his gay roommate, Tyler Clementi. Clementi’s case gained national attention when he committed suicide shortly after the spying by jumping off the George Washington Bridge Sept. 22, 2010.
Last week Ravi was convicted of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, witness tampering and hindering arrest, stemming from his role in activating the webcam to peek at Clementi’s date with a man in the dorm room on Sept. 19, 2010. Ravi was also convicted of encouraging others to spy during a second date, on Sept. 21, 2010, and intimidating Clementi for being gay.
According to ABC News, three of the convictions carry a sentence of five to 10 years in prison. Because Ravi is a citizen of India, and is in the U.S. on a green card, he could be deported following his sentencing.
Take a look at the video below while the verdicts to various counts were being read. Ravi mostly has a stoic expression on his face, except for some expressions of surprise to the jury’s decision on certain counts.
What do you see?
Children with Sleep Disordered Breathing Prone to Emotional Problems?
A new study conducted by researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, suggests that young children who have Sleep Disordered Breathing (SDB) are more likely to develop behavioral problems including hyperactivity and aggressiveness.
PsyhCentral reports that this study is the largest of its kind and found that the disorder peaks in children between the ages of 2-6 years. The main symptoms of SDB include snoring and sleep apnea and the primary causes of SDB are enlarged tonsils or adenoids.
Lead researcher Karen Bonuck, Ph.D. purported , “This is the strongest evidence to date that snoring, mouth breathing, and apnea (abnormally long pauses in breathing during sleep) can have serious behavioral and social-emotional consequences for children.”
Parents filled out a questionnaire when their child was around four to seven years of age. This Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire is widely used to access behavior and rates for inattention and hyperactivity as well as emotional symptoms , peer difficulty and behavior problems.
A pertinent question would be if the study took in to consideration other factors for behavioral problems , and the answer is yes. The study accounted for 15 additional factors such as socioeconomic status, maternal smoking during pregnancy and low birth-weight.
“We found that children with sleep-disordered breathing were from 40 to 100 percent more likely to develop neurobehavioral problems by age 7, compared with children without breathing problems,” said Bonuck. “The biggest increase was in hyperactivity, but we saw significant increases across all five behavioral measures.”
Researchers suggest that SDB triggers behavioral problems by harming the brain with a decrease in oxygen levels; therefore, an increase in carbon dioxide levels in the prefrontal cortex, which interrupts the restorative process of sleep.
Guess the Microexpression
Can you find the micro facial expression of emotion in the video below?
A microexpression is an emotional response that often occurs without our conscious awareness and reveals a person’s internal state. It is interesting to see it in an advertising campaign ad.
Take a look at this Faceology article on analytical interviewing. Page three goes into more depth about this particular ad.
Maggie Pazian writes “We do not and cannot exactly know the cause of the microexpression without engaging Dr. Tendler [the woman in the video above] in conversation and probing into the topic that appears to have spurred the emotional reaction but there is still important information that we can glean from seeing a microexpression.
As a side note, the emotion of disgust (as seen in the video above) is one of the seven basic emotions. To learn more about disgust, take a look at this blog article on disgust and disease.
What are your thoughts on this ad as well as microexpression in general?
Ones and Zeros Taking over the World
Gaming has become a sport of sorts with millions of gamers (both video and computer) logging into virtual worlds every day. Artificial Intelligence helps develop a gamer’s experiences and that virtual world has come a long way since the days of Super Mario Brothers.
The Verge has reported on the effects of the zeros and ones that create the myriad of virtual worlds in gaming. Just like in the movie The Matrix, zeros and ones are what every computer program are compiled of. With all the technological advances, the world is basically run by computer programs and so in effect zeros and ones rule the world.
AI expert and president of AI design consultant Intrinsic Algorithm, David Mark claims that the artificial intelligence systems involved in gaming are like 2-year-olds, “We can’t create psychology in our characters,” he told a gathering of game developers. “They don’t have psychology because they are zeroes and ones.”
Here are some startling statistics about the impact of just zeros and ones from ESRB Entertainment Software; the average age of video game purchasers is 39. The average number of years an adult gamer has been playing is 12. In 2010, the average gamer spent 8 hours a week playing games (and that is just the average).
Below is a video created by psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel in the 1940s to explore the “attribution of causality.” The short video shows two animated triangles, an animated circle and a box. There was no audio, just the crude line drawings moving around.
“In the absence of defining information people project what they believe should be there,” Mark said, which is the key to making gamers feel like they are in real world scenarios.
“It’s really just two triangles, a circle and some lines,” Mark pointed out. He goes on to state that, “People are emotional…They want to engage with emotional characters. They will often engage their own psychology to do that. They will assume causality and infer narrative.”
One last statistic to leave you with: the gaming industries’ revenue for 2009 was a whooping $10.5 billion dollars. This might beg the question for some: how can there be so many hungry and homeless Americans? The answer is simply Capitalism. It is America’s glory and perhaps some of our demise.
This is why many Americans do and should care about ones and zeros: not only do they create the convenience of modern life, they are also the money makers.
Ask the Expert: Your Questions to Dr. Matsumoto Part 5
Humintell is happy to announce that the “Ask the Expert” series is back, with a fifth edition.
In the past we’ve posted several blogs with your (the viewer’s) questions to Humintell director Dr. Matsumoto and his answers.
Take a look at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 by clicking on the appropriate links.
Ask your specific question(s) to Dr. Matsumoto in the comments section above. The questions can be related to anything: microexpressions, facial expressions of emotions in general, culture, emotion, nonverbal behavior, reading body language, recent research or detecting deception.
Please no inappropriate questions! Don’t forget we monitor all questions asked on the blog and inappropriate questions will be deleted.
We’ll select certain questions we think are interesting, interview Dr. Matsumoto and post the responses within two weeks.
Thanks for your participation!
For more information on Dr. Matsumoto, visit his website. Don’t forget to follow him on facebook and twitter.
Our Brain and Facial Expressions
Recognizing facial expressions of emotion is no small task. As simple as it may sound, many people find it difficult to understand how someone is really responding to their words or actions based upon facial expressions that sometimes only last a fraction of a second.
HindustanTimes reports on a study conducted by Dr. Lesley Fellows that focused on regions of the brain that are connected to face recognition and emotion processing skills.
What they found was that the area of the brain with the biggest impact on emotion recognition was the ventromedial PFC.
Dr. Fellows commented, “Patients with damage to the ventromedial PFC had a hard time distinguishing a neutral facial expression from emotional ones..Patients with left ventrolateral PFC damage recognized that an emotion was present in the expression, but had difficulty telling one emotion from another.”
The study’s findings, published in the Journal Cerebral Cortex, could help to understand some of the difficulties in social behavior seen in illnesses including certain forms of dementia, autism, or after a traumatic brain injury.
The Language of Culture
Culture is central to human success? Well, that is exactly what author and evolutionary biologist Dr. Mark Pagel suggests in his new book Wired for Culture.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the thesis of Dr. Pagel’s book is that human being’s lives became dominated by culture, they could have adopted habits that did not lead to having more descendants. However, we did not. We set about using culture to favor survival of those like us at the expense of other groups.
In this book, Pagel argues that, “[if our] cultures have promoted our genetic interests throughout our history,” then our “particular culture is not for us, but for our genes.”
He delineates the connection between different languages and diverging cultures. He calls language “one of the most powerful, dangerous and subversive traits that natural selection has ever devised.”
Do you agree with that statement?
In his book, Pagel goes on to extrapolate that the parallels between genetics and linguistics are that they are both digital systems, in which words or base pairs are recombined to make an infinite possibility of messages.
He writes, “ People will risk their health and well-being, their chances to have children, or even their lives for their culture. People will treat others well or badly merely as an accident of their cultural inheritance.”
Think about the actions and cultures of other nations. Do you agree with that statement?
Read more about Pagel’s ideas of language and culture in his book Wired for Culture and let us know your opinion on his theories.
Below is a video of Dr. Pagel’s ideas regarding how language transformed humanity.
Caught in the “Net”
Recently we blogged about the advertising of the future now new research has upped the ante with computers that can catch you telling lies.
Has it really happened already?
Past research has found that the average person can only delineate a lie from the truth about 50% of the time. It has also shown that experienced experts can do so only about 65% of the time. Then there are a rare few dubbed “Truth Wizards” that are capable of reading lies with a 80% accuracy rate.
The Scientifc American has reported that researchers at the University of Buffalo have created video software that they claim can aid interrogators/interviewers in detecting deception.
Their software analyzes eye movement for signs of deceit and according to the researchers can accurately determine deception 82.5% of the time.
Dr. Mark Frank a seasoned lie detector, University of Buffalo professor of communications, and co-author of the study believes that their results have laid the foundation for larger studies to incorporate a greater testing group size and add the dimension of body language in an effort to determine whether new technologies can aide investigators with a significant percent of accuracy.
It is important to point out that this study did not focus on the myths of lie detection such as looking to the left or down constitutes a lie. They did have computer software track participants eye movements while being questioned. In the beginning of the interviews the interrogators focused on conversational questions to determine a baseline for each participant. Therefore, a deviation from this baseline could suggest there was more to what was being said.
The software compared each subject’s baseline eye movement with those observed during the questions about a check that the participants may or may not have taken. If the computer detected a large deviation, the researchers noted this change and flagged that person as a potential liar.
Joe Navarro a retired FBI counter-intelligence special agent commented on the need to take the whole body as well as the face into consideration when trying to detect deception, “I can tell you as an investigator and somebody who’s studied this not just superficially but in depth, you have to observe the whole body…”
The Buffalo researchers do plan to take a more holistic view of behavioral cues in future studies.
“We know that the eyes give signals that lead to deception, but what about general body movements,” states Ifeoma Nwogu study co-author and a research assistant.
Nwogu goes on to state that faster algorithms would also enable the software to flag behavioral deviations in near real-time.
What are your thoughts on this type of computer deception software?
Wealth & Deception Go Hand in Hand?
The upper class is more likely to believe that greed is good? Well that is what Futurity.org is reporting.
A UC Berkeley study, published in the journal The Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, has revealed that wealthier people were more likely to lie and cheat when gambling or negotiating. They were also found to have a greater propensity to endorse unethical behavior in the work place.
“As these issues come to the fore, our research—and that by others—helps shed light on the role of inequality in shaping patterns of ethical conduct and selfish behavior, and points to certain ways in which these patterns might also be changed,” Paul Piff, a doctoral student in Psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the study purports.
He goes on to state, “These findings have very clear implications for how increased wealth and status in society shapes patterns of ethical behavior, and suggest that the different social values among the haves and the have-nots help drive these tendencies.”
What are your thoughts on wealth and greed? Do you think that the wealthier You become the greedier you are?
Cyber Education
The growth of the Internet has created a wide range of opportunities for companies and organizations.
Now education is jumping on the Internet bandwagon with an increasing amount of reputable colleges offering online courses and degrees.
Many prospective students appropriately ask, what if I have a question or don’t understand the material? The fear that they will be bored and learn little is a real concern. Now, technology is finding ingenious solutions to those pertinent questions.
eScience News has reported that researchers from MIT, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Memphis have created new software dubbed “Auto Tutor” that can respond to student’s emotional states such as frustration and boredom in online classes.
This new software gauges student’s knowledge by asking questions and identifies and corrects misconceptions and senses frustration and boredom via facial expression and body posture.
This new software technology rivals the interaction of human tutors according to its creators.
Sydney D’Mello, the University of Notre Dame’s Assistant Professor of Psychology, commented, “Much like a gifted human tutor, AutoTutor and Affective AutoTutor attempt to keep the student balanced between the extremes of boredom and bewilderment by subtly modulating the pace, direction and complexity of the learning task.”
UPI.com also noted that the new technology, which mimics the interaction of human tutors, offers tremendous learning possibilities for students by redefining human-computer interaction.
The study, which will be published in a special edition of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.
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