Failure at the World Cup

All triumphant athletes look alike, but do all distraught and disappointed ones? In past blogs, we have noted frequent observations of the universal “triumphant” pose amongst victors in sports competitions, but sports reveal other universal poses as well. For instance, as David Gendelman writes for The New York Times, this summer’s World Cup helps showcase…

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Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones. This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of…

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Out of the Corner of Your Eye

The role of peripheral vision in emotional recognition is crucial to our perception of the world. This is the conclusion of exciting research by Dr. Fraser Smith of the University of East Anglia. Dr. Smith and his team looked at the ways in which our peripheral vision manages to capture expressions of fear, tying this…

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Universal or Just Deceptive Emotions?

We spend a fair amount of this blog discussing the role of universal emotional expressions, but not everyone agrees. Some emerging research, such as a recent study by Drs. Carlos Crivelli and Alan Fridlund, has begun to challenge some fundamental ideas related to the concept of basic emotions. This research questions whether facial expressions reflect…

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