Baby Face
New evidence shows that facial expressions begin in utero. Laughing and smiling begin in the womb as early as 24 weeks and are very prevalent by 32.
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?
Computer Can Recognize Emotion Through Voice
Researchers in Madrid have created a computer system allowing for custom customer service, wherein through elements of a user’s speech such as tone and speed, a computer can gauge human emotion. Therefore, the computer can act responsively to defuse heightening situations.
Take a look at the video below to learn more.
Facial Recognition and the Brain
Most people can probably sympathize with the uncomfortable encounter with someone you think you know but aren’t quite sure if you do yet they look so familiar or perhaps you can’t quite place their face to a name and are secretly hoping someone will ask first?
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!
The Web of Deceit
We’ve all heard that it is in human nature to deceive people. Whether it is a malicious lie or a “harmless” white lie, we all do it especially when there is something big on the line (say a relationship or money).
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.
Look Into My Eyes
In the past many studies have been conducted on children with autism and social disorders such as bipolar disorder and mood dysregulation. It has been well documented that children with these disorders have problems identifying facial expressions of emotion but little has been know of why.
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.
The Depth of Deception
Do you ever wonder why it is so hard to tell the truth all of the time? Why is it that we are deceptive beings?
Well, Salon.com has reported on the mechanics of deceit, the evolutionary science of deceit and how the two areas overlap.
The article focuses on Robert Trivers a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
Via a phone interview Trivers reveals how to define deception and how it works. When asked the question, “When you talk about deceit and self-deception what exactly are you talking about?” Trivers responded, “Well, in verbal terms it would be lying to others and lying to yourself. But deception is much deeper because it doesn’t require language and it’s found in a whole series of other animals.
His book, The Folly of Fools reveals more than just information on typical deception. Some of the topics covered include animal predation and people’s sex lives.
To see the rest of Triver’s interview click here.
The Evolution of Language
Humans have learned a lot about our growth as a species through the study of apes and ape culture, and now the latest scientific evidence suggests that language originated with our hands.
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.
Robots Read Facial Expressions?
Nowadays, robots can do almost anything- the one thing they are lacking is the ability to read facial expressions. Well, that just might be changing.
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.
Are You Really Aware of Your Feelings and Emotions?
True and Interesting Fact: The average human has about 6 thousand thoughts a day, many of which are repeating thoughts.
PsychCentral suggests that we want to be aware of what we tell ourselves so that we —rather than our emotions—direct our choices. They also reveal that cognitive abilities do not fully develop until the mid-20′s.
So why is it so important to keep our emotions under control? Well, they say that our thoughts activate emotion driven processes within us, which includes negative as well as positives reactions.
So how can we control our feelings and emotional awareness? The first thing to recognize is that events and people’s actions may trigger unpleasant feelings and reactions, but they do not cause them. What causes our painful feelings is what we tell ourselves about those situations.
Our feelings are indicators, according to this article, of when we are off track in relation to where we want to be (i.e. our goals/visions). It is important for us to be in-tune with our painful and unpleasant emotions such as anger, guilt, shame, hurt and anxiety because they provide information that pleasant emotions cannot.
Here are 6 steps to help you understand and process your emotions:
1. Select a triggering situation to process.
2. Identify and feel your emotions and feelings.
3. Feel and notice the location of any sensations in your body.
4. Accept your feelings, and be confident that you can handle the emotion(s) and sensations.
5. Identify what you tell yourself in your mind that is triggering any painful emotions.
6. Connect empathically to understand and validate your experience.
Smile! You’ll Look Younger
Forget Botox to make you look younger. New research suggests that the mere act of smiling makes you look younger than you are.
NewsMaxHealth writes that the Institute for Human Development (Max Planck Institute) in Berlin has published a study, in Psychology and Aging and the journal of Emotion Cognition, that found that smiling makes people look more attractive and therefore younger.
The study included 154 German men and women of various ages. The participants were asked to examine more than 2,000 photographs of 171 people and then estimate their age.
In a related article by PsychCentral, being happy can lead us to be healthier and to live longer. This seems to be the case across most cultures. So, there is not just the reason that you’ll look young to smile, but you’ll feel younger and healthier too.
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