My Thoughts on Humpty Dumpty, Science, and Humility I have spent all my adult life working in three different worlds. For more than 40 years, I have been a scientist studying human behavior, particularly emotion, nonverbal behavior, and culture. As a scientist, I have tried to discover things that are reliably true about people. What…
Read MoreWhy Understanding People Is Harder Than We Think
From Group-Level Science to the Individual in Front of Us Introduction Something has been bugging me for decades. I have spent most of my professional life trying to understand people scientifically. Along the way, behavioral science has given us an enormous amount of valuable knowledge about human behavior. We know a great deal about…
Read MoreFacial Expressions and the Science of Nonverbal Cues
For decades, facial expressions have often been viewed as direct reflections of emotion—a smile means happiness, a frown means frustration, and a grimace signals discomfort. While emotions certainly play a role, emerging neuroscience suggests the story is far more sophisticated. Recent research is revealing that facial expressions are not simply emotional outputs. Instead, they are…
Read MoreMaster the Science of Nonverbal Behavior
What if everything you thought you knew about emotions was only half the story? In this opening episode of the Nonverbal ACEs Masters Series, Dr. David Matsumoto — one of the world’s foremost authorities on emotion science, cross-cultural psychology, and the universality of facial expressions — challenges practitioners to go deeper than conventional training…
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