Emotions vs Expressions

We know there are seven “basic” emotions, but aren’t there many more emotions? In fact, there is significant difference between what emotions we experience and how our faces are able to express these emotions. While mountains of previous research have settled on the existence of seven basic emotional expressions, ongoing research seeks to quantify exactly…

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Smelling Feelings?

If something smells awful, it’s because it’s disgusting, right? Maybe, but the truth is a little bit more complicated. A recent study found that our immediate olfactory reactions to stimuli are heavily influenced by the emotional reactions of other people. This suggests that when we smell something bad, we may be picking up on people’s…

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How to Tell if Someone Is Lying to You

How can we learn how to spot deception? It is a sad truth that lying is incredibly pervasive in our interactions with fellow humans. While people lie for a multitude of reasons, we are also quite bad at lie detection, creating a pretty bleak predicament for those of us who value honesty. In a recent…

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Emotionally Disguised Faces

Emotional and facial recognition may be even more closely linked than we thought. In past blogs, we have discussed how better understanding facial recognition may help us better understand emotional recognition, and we have also talked about how understanding emotions requires similar processes as those which identify faces. During that discussion, we explained how recognizing…

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