Methods using synthesized micro-expressions are popular in micro-expression recognition research as well as training materials (Endres & Laidlaw, 2009). The most well-known methods include the Micro-expression Training Tool (METT) and the Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT), both developed by Paul Ekman, and the MiX and SubX programs. Jul 02, 2013 Dr. Paul Ekman on Expression and Gesture and Their Role in Emotion and Deception - Part 1 of 2. 2007 Emotions Revealed Media Producer/Director: Paul Kaufman Presentation made possible by a grant.
(Redirected from Paul Eckman)
Born | February 15, 1934 (age 85) Washington, D.C., United States |
---|---|
Known for | Microexpressions, Lie to Me |
Spouse(s) | Mary Ann Mason |
Awards | Named by the American Psychological Association as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century based on publications, citations and awards (2001) Honorary Degree, University of Fernando Pessoa, Portugal (2008) Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Adelphi University (2008) Honorary Degree, University of Geneva, Switzerland (2008) Named of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine (2009) Honorary Degree, Lund University, Sweden (2011) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Psychology Anthropology |
Doctoral advisor | John Amsden Starkweather |
Influences | Charles Darwin, Silvan Tomkins |
Website | PaulEkman.com |
Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) is an Americanpsychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He has created an 'atlas of emotions' with more than ten thousand facial expressions, and has gained a reputation as the best human lie detector in the world.He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most cited psychologists of the twentieth century.[1] Ekman conducted seminal research on the specific biological correlations of specific emotions, demonstrating the universality and discreteness of emotions in a Darwinian approach.[2][3]
Paul Ekman
- 1Biography
- 2Research work
Biography[edit]
Conversations with History: Paul Ekman on YouTube, University of California Television, 58:00, April 2008 |
Childhood[edit]
Paul Ekman was born in 1934 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in a Jewish family[4] in New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, and California. His father was a pediatrician and his mother was an attorney. His sister, Joyce Steingart, is a psychoanalytic psychologist who before her retirement practiced in New York City.[3]
Ekman originally wanted to be a psychotherapist, but when he was drafted into the army in 1958 he found that research could change army routines, making them more humane. This experience converted him from wanting to be a psychotherapist to wanting to be a researcher, in order to help as many people as possible.[5] Frigidaire dehumidifier manuals online.
Education[edit]
At the age of 15, without graduating from high school, Paul Ekman enrolled at the University of Chicago where he completed three years of undergraduate study. During his time in Chicago he was fascinated by group therapy sessions and understanding group dynamics. Notably, his classmates at Chicago included writer Susan Sontag, film director Mike Nichols, and actress Elaine May.[6]
He then studied two years at New York University (NYU), earning his BA in 1954.[3] The subject of his first research project, under the direction of his NYU professor, Margaret Tresselt, was an attempt to develop a test of how people would respond to group therapy.[7]
Next, Ekman was accepted into the Adelphi University graduate program for clinical psychology.[7] While working for his master's degree, Ekman was awarded a predoctoral research fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1955.[7] His Master's thesis was focused on facial expression and body movement he had begun to study in 1954.[7] Ekman eventually went on to receive his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Adelphi University in 1958, after a one-year internship at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute.[7][8]
Military service[edit]
Paul Ekman Micro Expressions Book
Ekman was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1958 to serve 2 years as soon as his internship at Langley Porter was finished.[7] He served as first lieutenant-chief psychologist, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where he did research on army stockades and psychological changes during infantry basic training.[7][9][10][11]
Career[edit]
Upon completion of military service in 1960, he accepted a position as a research associate with Leonard Krasner at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, working on a grant focused on the operant conditioning of verbal behavior in psychiatric patients. Ekman also met anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1960 who was on the staff of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Five years later, Gregory Bateson gave Paul Ekman motion picture films taken in Bali in the mid-1930s to help Ekman with cross-cultural studies of expression and gesture.[7]
From 1960 to 1963, Ekman was supported by a post doctoral fellowship from NIMH. He submitted his first research grant through San Francisco State College with himself as the principal investigator (PI) at the young age of 29.[12] He received this grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1963 to study nonverbal behaviour. This award would be continuously renewed for the next 40 years and would pay his salary until he was offered a professorship at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1972.
Encouraged by his college friend and teacher Silvan S. Tomkins, Ekman shifted his focus from body movement to facial expressions. He wrote his most famous book, Telling Lies, and published it in 1985. The 4th edition is still in print. He retired in 2004 as professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). From 1960 to 2004 he also worked at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute on a limited basis consulting on various clinical cases.
After retiring from the University of California, San Francisco, Paul Ekman founded the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) and Paul Ekman International.[13]
Paul Ekman Facial Expression
Media[edit]
In 2001, Ekman collaborated with John Cleese for the BBCdocumentary series The Human Face.[14]
His work is frequently referred to in the TV series Lie to Me.[15] Dr. Lightman is based on Paul Ekman, and Ekman served as a scientific adviser for the series; he read and edited the scripts and sent video clip-notes of facial expressions for the actors to imitate. While Ekman has written 15 books, the series Lie to Me has more effectively brought Ekman's research into people's homes.[15]
He has also collaborated with Pixar's film director and animator Pete Docter in preparation of his 2015 film Inside Out.[16] Ekman also wrote a parent's guide to using Inside Out to help parents talk with their children about emotion, which can be found on his personal website.
Influence[edit]
He was named one of the top Time 100 most influential people in the May 11, 2009 edition of Time magazine.[17] He was also ranked fifteenth among the most influential psychologists of the 21st century in 2014 by the journal Archives of Scientific Psychology.[18] He is currently on the Editorial Board of Greater Good magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. His contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.
Research work[edit]
Measuring nonverbal communication[edit]
Ekman's interest in nonverbal communication led to his first publication in 1957, describing how difficult it was to develop ways of empirically measuring nonverbal behaviour.[19] He chose the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, the psychiatry department of the University of California Medical School, for his clinical internship partly because Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees had recently published a book called Nonverbal Communication (1956).[7][20][21]
Ekman then focused on developing techniques for measuring nonverbal communication. He found that facial muscular movements that created facial expressions could be reliably identified through empirical research. He also found that human beings are capable of making over 10,000 facial expressions; only 3,000 relevant to emotion.[22] Psychologist Silvan Tomkins convinced Ekman to extend his studies of nonverbal communication from body movement to the face, helping him design his classic cross-cultural emotion recognition studies.[23]
Emotions as universal categories[edit]
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872, Charles Darwin theorized that emotions were evolved traits universal to the human species. However, the prevalent belief during the 1950s, particularly among anthropologists, was that facial expressions and their meanings were determined through behavioural learning processes. A prominent advocate of the latter perspective was the anthropologist Margaret Mead who had travelled to different countries examining how cultures communicated using nonverbal behaviour.
Through a series of studies, Ekman found a high agreement across members of diverse Western and Eastern literate cultures on selecting emotional labels that fit facial expressions. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating wrath, grossness, scaredness, joy, loneliness, and shock. Findings on contempt were less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.[24] Working with Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings extended to preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media depictions of emotion.[25] Ekman and Friesen then demonstrated that certain emotions were exhibited with very specific display rules, culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom and when. These display rules could explain how cultural differences may conceal the universal effect of expression.[26]
In the 1990s, Ekman proposed an expanded list of basic emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions that are not all encoded in facial muscles.[27] The newly included emotions are: Amusement, Contempt, Contentment, Embarrassment, Excitement, Guilt, Pride in achievement, Relief, Satisfaction, Sensory pleasure, and Shame.[27]
Visual depictions of facial actions for studying emotion[edit]
Ekman's famous test of emotion recognition was the Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA) stimulus set published in 1976. Consisting of 110 black and white images of Caucasian actors portraying the six universal emotions plus neutral expressions, the POFA has been used to study emotion recognition rates in normal and psychiatric populations around the world. Ekman used these stimuli in his original cross-cultural research. Many researchers favor the POFA because these photographs have been rated by large normative groups in different cultures. In response to critics, however, Ekman eventually released a more culturally diverse set of stimuli called the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE).[28]
By 1978, Ekman and Friesen had finalized and developed the Facial Action Coding System. FACS is an anatomically based system for describing all observable facial movement for every emotion. Each observable component of facial movement is called an action unit or AU and all facial expressions can be decomposed into their constituent core AUs.[29] An update of this tool came in the early 2000s.
Other tools have been developed, including the MicroExpressions Training Tool (METT), which can help individuals identify more subtle emotional expressions that occur when people try to suppress their emotions. Application of this tool includes helping people with Asperger's or autism to recognize emotional expressions in their everyday interactions. The Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT) teaches recognition of very small, micro signs of emotion. These are very tiny expressions, sometimes registering in only part of the face, or when the expression is shown across the entire face, but is very small. Subtle expressions occur for many reasons, for example, the emotion experienced may be very slight or the emotion may be just beginning. METT and SETT have been shown to increase accuracy in evaluating truthfulness[citation needed].
Paul Ekman International was established in 2010 by www.eiagroup.com based on a partnership between Cliff Lansley and Paul Ekman to deliver emotional skills and deception detection workshops around the world, based on Dr Ekman's 50 years of research.
Detecting deception[edit]
Ekman has contributed to the study of social aspects of lying, and why we lie [30] and why we are often unconcerned with detecting lies.[31] He first became interested in detecting lies while completing his clinical work. As detailed in Ekman's Telling Lies, a patient he was involved in treating denied that she was suicidal in order to leave the hospital. Ekman began to review videotaped interviews to study people's facial expressions while lying. In a research project along with Maureen O'Sullivan, called the Wizards Project (previously named the Diogenes Project), Ekman reported on facial 'microexpressions' which could be used to assist in lie detection. After testing a total of 20,000 people[32] from all walks of life, he found only 50 people who had the ability to spot deception without any formal training. These naturals are also known as 'Truth Wizards', or wizards of deception detection from demeanor.[33]
In his profession, he also uses oral signs of lying. When interviewed about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he mentioned that he could detect that former President Bill Clinton was lying because he used distancing language.[34]
Contributions[edit]
In his 1993 paper in the psychology journal American Psychologist, Ekman describes nine direct contributions that his research on facial expression has made to the understanding of emotion.[35] Highlights include:
- Consideration of both nature and nurture: Emotion is now viewed as a physiological phenomenon influenced by our cultural and learning experiences.
- Emotion-specific physiology: Ekman led the way by trying to find discrete psychophysiological differences across emotions. A number of researchers continue to search for emotion-specific autonomic and central nervous system activations. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, a topic of intense interest revolves around how specific emotions relate to physiological activations in certain brain areas. Ekman laid the groundwork for the future field of affective neuroscience.
- An examination of events that precede emotions: Ekman's finding that voluntarily making one of the universal facial expressions can generate the physiology and some of the subjective experience of emotion provided some difficulty for some of the earlier theoretical conceptualizations of experiencing emotions.
- Considering emotions as families: Ekman & Friesen (1978) found not one expression for each emotion, but a variety of related but visually different expressions. For example, the authors reported 60 variations of the anger expression which share core configurational properties and distinguish themselves clearly from the families of fearful expressions, disgust expressions, and so on. Variations within a family likely reflect the intensity of the emotion, how the emotion is controlled, whether it is simulated or spontaneous, and the specifics of the event that provoked the emotion.
Criticisms[edit]
Most credibility-assessment researchers agree that untrained people are unable to visually detect lies.[36] The application of part of Ekman's work to airport security via the Transportation Security Administration's 'Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques' (SPOT) program has been criticized for not having been put through controlled scientific tests.[36] A 2007 report on SPOT referring to untrained people stated that 'simply put, people (including professional lie-catchers with extensive experience of assessing veracity) would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin'.[37] Since controlled scientific tests typically involve people playing the part of terrorists, Ekman says those people are unlikely to have the same emotions as actual terrorists.[36]
A more recent report from the Department of Homeland Security DHS Report 2015 confirms that 'there is a significant body of scientific evidence and operationalliterature that supports the use of behavior detection indicators to identify high-risk passengers. TSA has compiled over 189 documents that include scientific researchstudies and exemplars from operational events that illustrate the reasoning for the use of the indicators in identifying terrorists who are an imminent threat.'
Field research by the EIA Group has documented empirical evidence of the impact of behavioral analysis in high-stake airport environments.
The methodology used by Ekman and O'Sullivan in their recent work on Truth wizards has also received criticism on the basis of validation.[38]
Other criticisms of Ekman's work are based on experimental and naturalistic studies by several other emotion psychologists that did not find evidence in support of Ekman's proposed taxonomy of discrete emotions and discrete facial expression.[39]
Ekman received hostility from some anthropologists at meetings of the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association from 1967 to 1969. He recounted that, as he was reporting his findings on universality of expression, one anthropologist tried to stop him from finishing by shouting that his ideas were fascist. He compares this to another incident when he was accused of being racist by an activist for claiming that Black expressions are not different from White expressions. In 1975, Margaret Mead, an anthropologist, wrote against Ekman for doing 'improper anthropology', and for disagreeing with Ray Birdwhistell's claim opposing universality. Ekman wrote that, while many people agreed with Birdwhistell then, most came to accept his own findings over the next decade.[12]However, some anthropologists continued to suggest that emotions are not universal.[40] Ekman argued that there has been no quantitative data to support the claim that emotions are culture specific. In his 1993 discussion of the topic, Ekman states that there is no instance in which 70% or more of one cultural group select one of the six universal emotions while another culture group labels the same expression as another universal emotion.[35]
Ekman criticized the tendency of psychologists to base their conclusions on surveys of college students. Hank Campbell quotes Ekman saying at the Being Human conference, 'We basically have a science of undergraduates.'[41]
Publications[edit]
- Nonverbal messages: Cracking the CodeISBN978-0-9915636-3-0
- Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion (Times Books, 2008) ISBN0-8050-8712-5
- Unmasking the FaceISBN1-883536-36-7
- Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (Times Books, 2003) ISBN0-8050-7516-X
- Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (W. W. Norton & Company, 1985) ISBN0-393-32188-6
- What the Face Reveals (with Rosenberg, E. L., Oxford University Press, 1998) ISBN0-19-510446-3
- The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (with R. Davidson, Oxford University Press, 1994) ISBN0-19-508944-8
- Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in ReviewISBN0-12-236750-2
- Facial Action Coding System/Investigator'sISBN99936-26-61-9
- Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness (Penguin, 1991) ISBN0-14-014322-X
- Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior ResearchISBN0-521-28072-9
- Face of ManISBN0-8240-7130-1
- Emotion in the Human FaceISBN0-08-016643-1
- Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (Sussex, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1999)
See also[edit]
- Lie to Me (TV series)
References[edit]
- ^Haggbloom, S. J. et al. (2002). The 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century. Review of General Psychology. Vol. 6, No. 2, 139–15. Haggbloom and his team combined 3 quantitative variables: citations in professional journals, citations in textbooks, and nominations in a survey given to members of the Association for Psychological Science, with 3 qualitative variables (converted to quantitative scores): National Academy of Science (NAS) membership, American Psychological Association (APA) President and/or recipient of the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and surname used as an eponym. Then the list was rank ordered. Ekman was #59.
- ^'Facial expression of emotion'. In V.S. Ramachandran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Vol. 2, pp. 173–83). Oxford: Elsevier/Academic Press. ISBN978-008-088-575-9.
- ^ abcNo Authorship Indicated (April 1992). 'Paul Ekman'. American Psychologist. 47 (4): 470–71. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.47.4.470.
- ^'Jews Among the 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the Twentieth Century'. www.jinfo.org. Retrieved 2019-05-31.
- ^http://search.proquest.com/docview/229138171
- ^'Conversation with Paul Ekman, p. 1 of 5'. Globetrotter.berkeley.edu. 2004-03-11. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
- ^ abcdefghiEkman, P. (1987). 'A life's pursuit.' In The Semiotic Web '86: An International Yearkbook, Sebeok, T. A.; Umiker-Seboek, J., Eds. Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 3–45.
- ^Eissner, B. Paul Ekman PH.D. '58, '08: East Meets West. http://profiles.adelphi.edu/profile/paul-ekman/http://www.adelphi.edu/adelphi-magazine/Adelphi-Magazine-Fall-2008.pdf.
- ^American Psychologist (April 1992), 'Paul Ekman' 47 (4), pp. 470–71
- ^Ekman, P.; Cohen, L.; Moos, R.; Raine, W.; Schlesinger, M.; Stone, G. (1963). 'Divergent Reactions to the Threat of War'. Science. 139 (3550): 88–94. doi:10.1126/science.139.3550.88. PMID17798702.
- ^Ekman, P.; Friesen, W.V.; Lutzker, D.R., 'Psychological Reactions to Infantry Basic Training'. Medicine, U. o. C. S. o., Ed. http://www.paulekman.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Psychological-Reactions-To-Infantry-Basic-Training.pdf
- ^ abEkman, P. (1987). 'A life's pursuit'. In The Semiotic Web '86: An International Yearkbook, Sebeok, T. A.; Umiker-Seboek, J., Eds. Berlin, Mouton De Gruyter, pp. 3–45
- ^'About Paul Ekman Group LLC'. Paulekman.com. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
- ^'Lifeboat Foundation Bios: Dr. Paul Ekman'. Lifeboat.com. 2002-09-16. Archived from the original on 2014-01-05. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
- ^ ab'The (Real!) Science Behind Fox's Lie to Me'. Popular Mechanics [Online], 2009.
- ^Dacher Keltner & Paul Ekman (2015-07-03). 'The Science of 'Inside Out''. The New York Times. Retrieved 2015-09-05.
- ^The 2009 TIME 100: Paul Ekman, Scientists & Thinkers. Time. April 30, 2009.
- ^An Incomplete List of Eminent Psychologists of the Modern Era American Psychological Association, 2014.
- ^Ekman, Paul (1957). 'A methodological discussion of nonverbal behavior'. Journal of Psychology. 43: 141–49. doi:10.1080/00223980.1957.9713059.
- ^Jurgen Ruesch, Weldon Kees (1969). Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations. Retrieved 2014-03-03 – via Books.google.com.
- ^Ruesch, J.; Kees, W. (1956). Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations. University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 205.
- ^'Watch Lie To Me: Expressions: Introduction online'. Hulu. Retrieved 2014-03-03.
- ^'FACS Investigators Guide – Acknowledgements'. Archived from the original on 6 October 2009. Retrieved 2 September 2009.
- ^Matsumoto, David (1992) 'More evidence for the universality of a contempt expression'. Motivation and Emotion. Springer Netherlands. Volume 16, Number 4 / December, 1992
- ^Ekman, P.; Friesen, W.V. (1971). 'Constants across cultures in the face and emotion'(PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 17 (2): 124–29. doi:10.1037/h0030377. PMID5542557. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2015-02-28. Retrieved 2015-02-28.
- ^Ekman, Paul (1989). 'The argument and evidence about universals in facial expressions of emotion'. In H. Wagner & A Manstead (ed.). Handbook of social psychophysiology. Chichester, England: Wiley. pp. 143–64.
- ^ abEkman, Paul (1999), 'Basic Emotions', in Dalgleish, T; Power, M (eds.), Handbook of Cognition and Emotion(PDF), Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons
- ^Ekman, P.; Matsumoto, D. 'Japanese and Caucasian facial expressions of emotion and neutral faces'.Cite journal requires
|journal=
(help) - ^Ekman, Paul. 'FACS vs. F.A.C.E.'
- ^Ekman, P., 1991: Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness
- ^Ekman, P., 1996: Why don't we catch liarsArchived 2010-01-08 at the Wayback Machine
- ^Camilleri, J., 'Truth Wizard knows when you've been lying', Chicago Sun-Times, January 21, 2009
- ^'NPR: The Face Never Lies'. Archived from the original on 2009-06-07.
- ^'The lie detective: San Francisco psychologist has made a science of reading facial expressions' by Julian Guthrie, San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 2002.
- ^ abEkman, Paul (1993). 'Facial Expression and Emotion'. American Psychologist. 48 (4): 384–92. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.48.4.384. PMID8512154.
- ^ abcSharon Weinberger (2010). 'Airport security: Intent to deceive? : Nature News'. Nature. Nature.com. 465 (7297): 412–415. doi:10.1038/465412a. PMID20505706.
- ^Hontz, C.R., Hartwig, M., Kleinman, S.M. & Meissner, C.A. 'Credibility Assessment at Portals', Portals Committee Report (2009).
- ^Bond, Charles F & Uysal, Ahmet. (2007). 'On lie detection 'wizards'. Law and human behavior, 31.
- ^Russel and Fernandez-Dols (1997). The Psychology of Facial Expression. Cambridge University Press.[ISBN missing][page needed]
- ^Lutz, C.; White, G.M. (1986). 'The anthropology of emotions'. Annual Review of Anthropology. 15: 405–36. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.15.1.405.
- ^Hank Campbell (16 April 2012). 'A Double-Blind Test Of Astrology For The 21st Century'. Science20.com.
..as the legendary Paul Ekman said at the Being Human conference, 'We basically have a science of undergraduates'
External links[edit]
- The Naked Face, Gladwell.com
- Recording of a conversation with Daniel Goleman
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_Ekman&oldid=919134750'
A microexpression[1][2]is the innate result of a voluntary and an involuntary emotional response occurring simultaneously and conflicting with one another. This occurs when the amygdala (the emotion center of the brain) responds appropriately to the stimuli that the individual experiences and the individual wishes to conceal this specific emotion. This results in the individual very briefly displaying their true emotions followed by a false emotional reaction.[3] Human emotions are an unconscious bio-psycho-social reaction that derives from the amygdala and they typically last 0.5–4.0 seconds,[4] although a microexpression will typically last less than 1/2 of a second.[5] Unlike regular facial expressions it is either very difficult or virtually impossible to hide microexpression reactions. Microexpressions cannot be controlled as they happen in a fraction of a second, but it is possible to capture someone's expressions with a high speed camera and replay them at much slower speeds.[6] Microexpressions express the seven universal emotions: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, contempt, and surprise. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, Paul Ekman expanded his list of emotions, including a range of positive and negative emotions not all of which are encoded in facial muscles. These emotions are amusement, embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, pride, relief, contentment, pleasure, and shame.[7][8]
History[edit]
Microexpressions were first discovered by Haggard and Isaacs. In their 1966 study, Haggard and Isaacs outlined how they discovered these 'micromomentary' expressions while 'scanning motion picture films of psychotherapy for hours, searching for indications of non-verbal communication between therapist and patient'[9] Through a series of studies, Paul Ekman found a high agreement across members of diverse Western and Eastern literate cultures on selecting emotional labels that fit facial expressions. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Findings on contempt are less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.[10] Working with his long-time friend Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings extended to preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media depictions of emotion.[11] Ekman and Friesen then demonstrated that certain emotions were exhibited with very specific display rules, culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom and when. These display rules could explain how cultural differences may conceal the universal effect of expression.[12]
In the 1960s, William S. Condon pioneered the study of interactions at the fraction-of-a-second level. In his famous research project, he scrutinized a four-and-a-half-second film segment frame by frame, where each frame represented 1/25th second. After studying this film segment for a year and a half, he discerned interactional micromovements, such as the wife moving her shoulder exactly as the husband's hands came up, which combined yielded rhythms at the micro level.[13]
Years after Condon's study, American psychologist John Gottman began video-recording living relationships to study how couples interact. By studying participants' facial expressions, Gottman was able to correlate expressions with which relationships would last and which would not.[14] Gottman's 2002 paper makes no claims to accuracy in terms of binary classification, and is instead a regression analysis of a two factor model where skin conductance levels and oral history narratives encodings are the only two statistically significant variables. Facial expressions using Ekman's encoding scheme were not statistically significant.[15] In Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, Gottman states that there are four major emotional reactions that are destructive to a marriage: defensiveness which is described as a reaction toward a stimulus as if you were being attacked, stonewalling which is the behavior where a person refuses to communicate or cooperate with another,[16]criticism which is the practice of judging the merits and faults of a person, and contempt which is a general attitude that is a mixture of the primary emotions disgust and anger.[17] Among these four, Gottman considers contempt the most important of them all.[18]
Types[edit]
Microexpressions are typically classified based on how an expression is modified. They exist in three groups:
- Simulated expressions: when a microexpression is not accompanied by a genuine emotion. This is the most commonly studied form of microexpression because of its nature. It occurs when there is a brief flash of an expression, and then returns to a neutral state.[19]
- Neutralized expressions: when a genuine expression is suppressed and the face remains neutral. This type of micro-expression is not observable due to the successful suppression of it by a person.[19]
- Masked expressions: when a genuine expression is completely masked by a falsified expression. Masked expressions are microexpressions that are intended to be hidden, either subconsciously or consciously.[20]
In photographs and films[edit]
Microexpressions can be difficult to recognize, but still images and video can make them easier to perceive. In order to learn how to recognize the way that various emotions register across parts of the face, Ekman and Friesen recommend the study of what they call 'facial blueprint photographs,' photographic studies of 'the same person showing all the emotions' under consistent photographic conditions.[21] However, because of their extremely short duration, by definition, microexpressions can happen too quickly to capture with traditional photography. Both Condon and Gottman compiled their seminal research by intensively reviewing film footage. Frame rate manipulation also allows the viewer to distinguish distinct emotions, as well as their stages and progressions, which would otherwise be too subtle to identify. This technique is demonstrated in the short film Thought Moments by Michael Simon Toon and a film in Malayalam Pretham 2016[22][23][24]Paul Ekman also has materials he has created on his website that teach people how to identify microexpressions using various photographs, including photos he took during his research period in New Guinea.[25]
Moods vs emotions[edit]
Moods differ from emotions in that the feelings involved last over a longer period. For example, a feeling of anger lasting for just a few minutes, or even for an hour, is called an emotion. But if the person remains angry all day, or becomes angry a dozen times during that day, or is angry for days, then it is a mood.[26] Many people describe this as a person being irritable, or that the person is in an angry mood. As Paul Ekman described, it is possible but unlikely for a person in this mood to show a complete anger facial expression. More often just a trace of that angry facial expression may be held over a considerable period: a tightened jaw or tensed lower eyelid, or lip pressed against lip, or brows drawn down and together.[27]Emotions are defined as a complex pattern of changes, including physiological arousal, feelings, cognitive processes, and behavioral reactions, made in response to a situation perceived to be personally significant.[28]
Controlled microexpressions[edit]
Facial expressions are not just uncontrolled instances. Some may in fact be voluntary and others involuntary, and thus some may be truthful and others false or misleading.[29] Facial expression may be controlled or uncontrolled. Some people are born able to control their expressions (such as pathological liars), while others are trained, for example actors. 'Natural liars' may be aware of their ability to control microexpressions, and so may those who know them well; they may have been 'getting away' with things since childhood due to greater ease in fooling their parents, teachers, and friends.[30] People can simulate emotion expressions, attempting to create the impression that they feel an emotion when they are not experiencing it at all. A person may show an expression that looks like fear when in fact they feel nothing, or perhaps some other emotion.[31] Facial expressions of emotion are controlled for various reasons, whether cultural or by social conventions. For example, in the United States many little boys learn the cultural display rule, 'little men do not cry or look afraid.' There are also more personal display rules, not learned by most people within a culture, but the product of the idiosyncrasies of a particular family. A child may be taught never to look angrily at his father, or never to show sadness when disappointed. These display rules, whether cultural ones shared by most people or personal, individual ones, are usually so well-learned, and learned so early, that the control of the facial expression they dictate is done automatically without thinking or awareness.[32]
Emotional intelligence[edit]
Involuntary facial expressions can be hard to pick up and understand explicitly, and it is more of an implicit competence of the unconscious mind. Daniel Goleman created a conclusion on the capacity of an individual to recognize their own, as well as others' emotions, and to discriminate emotions based on introspection of those feelings. This is part of Goleman's emotional intelligence. In E.I, attunement is an unconscious synchrony that guides empathy. Attunement relies heavily on nonverbal communication.[33] Looping is where facial expressions can elicit involuntary behavior, In the research motor mimicry there shows neurons that pick up on facial expressions and communicate with motor neurons responsible for muscles in the face to display the same facial expression. Thus displaying a smile may elicit a micro expression of a smile on someone who is trying to remain neutral in their expression.[34]
The amygdala is the emotion center of the brain
Through fMRI we can see the area where these Mirror neurons are located lights up when you show the subject an image of a face expressing an emotion using a mirror. In the relationship of the prefrontal cortex also known as the (executive mind) which is where cognitive thinking experience and the amygdala being part of the limbic system is responsible for involuntary functions, habits, and emotions. The amygdala can hijack the pre-frontal cortex in a sympathetic response. In his book Emotional Intelligence Goleman uses the case of Jason Haffizulla (who assaulted his high school physics teacher because of a grade he received on a test) as an example of an emotional hijacking this is where rationality and better judgement can be impaired.[33] This is one example of how the bottom brain can interpret sensory memory and execute involuntary behavior. This is the purpose of microexpressions in attunement and how you can interpret the emotion that is shown in a fraction of a second. The microexpression of a concealed emotion that's displayed to an individual will elicit the same emotion in them to a degree, this process is referred to as an emotional contagion.[34] Being able to introspect these emotions can have applications to having more accurate judgements on an individuals intentions although accuracy depends a lot of factors. Accuracy can be determined by an web based microemotional aptitude test called the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS) which is similar to the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) which tests the ability to read emotions.
MFETT and SFETT[edit]
Micro Facial expression training tools and subtle Facial expression training tools are software made to develop someone's skills in the competence of recognizing emotion. The software consists of a set of videos that you watch after being educated on the facial expressions. After watching a short clip, there is a test of your analysis of the video with immediate feedback. This tool is to be used daily to produce improvements. Individuals that are exposed to the test for the first time usually do poor trying to assume what expression was presented, but the idea is through the reinforcement of the feedback you unconsciously generate the correct expectations of that expression. These tools are used to develop rounder social skills and a better capacity for empathy. They are also quite useful for development of social skills in people on the autism spectrum.[34] Although lie detection is not only an important skill in social situations and the workplace, but is a vital aspect to law enforcement and other occupations that deal with continual acts of deception. Microexpression and subtle expression recognition are valuable assets for these occupations as it increases the chance of detecting deception. In recent years it was found that the average person has a 54% accuracy rate in terms of exposing whether a person is lying or being truthful.[35] However, Ekman had done a research experiment and discovered that secret service agents have a 64% accuracy rate. In later years, Ekman found groups of people that are intrigued by this form of detecting deception and had accuracy rates that ranged from 68% to 73%. Their conclusion was that people with the same training on microexpression and subtle expression recognition will vary depending on their level of emotional intelligence.[35]
Lies and leakage[edit]
The sympathetic nervous system is one of two divisions under the autonomic nervous system, it functions involuntarily and one aspect of the system deals with emotional arousal in response to situations accordingly.[36] Therefore, if an individual decides to deceive someone, they will experience a stress response within because of the possible consequences if caught. A person using deception will typically cope by using nonverbal cues which take the form of bodily movements. These bodily movements occur because of the need to release the chemical buildup of cortisol, which is produced at a higher rate in a situation where there is something at stake.[37] The purpose for these involuntary nonverbal cues are to ease oneself in a stressful situation. In the midst of deceiving an individual, leakage can occur which is when nonverbal cues are exhibited and are contradictory to what the individual is conveying.[38] Despite this useful tactic of detecting deception, microexpressions do not show what intentions or thoughts the deceiver is trying to conceal. They only provide the fact that there was emotional arousal in the context of the situation. If an individual displays fear or surprise in the form of a microexpression, it does not mean that the individual is concealing information that is relevant to investigation. This is similar to how polygraphs fail to some degree: because there is a sympathetic response due to the fear of being disbelieved as innocent. The same goes for microexpressions, when there is a concealed emotion there is no information revealed on why that emotion was felt. They do not determine a lie, but are a form of detecting concealed information. David Matsumoto is a well-known American psychologist and explains that one must not conclude that someone is lying if a microexpression is detected but that there is more to the story than is being told.[39]Paul Ekman created a paradigm to determine the confidence in deception apprehension due to the context of the situation and the person to be the liar themselves. The situational factors can be the type of person, any relationships, or the type of lie they are telling, or whether it is the act of withholding information or telling a false information. If a lie is successful, it can be followed by expressions of false delight, which is when happiness expressed in the satisfaction of the deceiver, or deception guilt, which can come on as an expression of fear or sadness.
There are also behavioral signs of false expressions or when an emotional expression is not genuinely being felt. Usually these can be interpreted implicitly because they are out of sync, similar to when something feels off about what somebody says, but these sign can go unnoticed.[40]
- Fear: when there is absence of the reliable forehead expression
- Sadness: when there is absence of the reliable forehead expression
- Happiness: lack of wrinkle around the eye (eye muscles not being involved)
- Negative emotions: absence of sympathetic somatic response.
- Any emotions: asymmetrical expression, onset of expression incongruent or abrupt.
Universality[edit]
Universal Facial Expressions
A significant amount of research has been done in respect to whether basic facial expressions are universal or are culturally distinct. After Charles Darwin had written The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals it was widely accepted that facial expressions of emotion are universal and biologically determined.[41] Many writers have disagreed with this statement. David Matsumoto however agreed with this statement in his study of sighted and blind Olympians. Using thousands of photographs captured at the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Matsumoto compared the facial expressions of sighted and blind judo athletes, including individuals who were born blind. All competitors displayed the same expressions in response to winning and losing.[42] Matsumoto discovered that both blind and sighted competitors displayed similar facial expression, during winnings and loss. These results suggest that our ability to modify our faces to fit the social setting is not learned visually.[42]
Facial Action Coding System[edit]
The Facial Action Coding System or FACS is used to identify facial expression. This identifies the muscles that produce the facial expressions. To measure the muscle movements the action unit (AU) was developed. This system measures the relaxation or contraction of each individual muscle and assigns a unit. More than one muscle can be grouped into an Action Unit or the muscle may be divided into separate action units. The score consists of duration, intensity and asymmetry. This can be useful in identifying depression or measurement of pain in patients that are unable to express themselves.[43]
The Facial Action Coding System training manual, first published in 1978 with multimedia supplements, is designed to teach individuals how to detect and categorize facial movements. The guide provides lessons and practice for memorizing action units and combinations of action units. The manual's purpose is to enable practitioners to recognize different physiological attributes of facial expressions, but leaves the interpretation of this data up to other works. Users should not expect to become face-reading experts. It can be particularly useful to behavioral scientists, CG animators, or computer scientists when they need to know the exact movements that the face can perform, and what muscles produce them. It also has potential to be a valuable tool for psychotherapists, interviewers, and other practitioners who must penetrate deeply into interpersonal communications.[44] A new version (2002) of FACS by Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager is now available with several core improvements, including more accurate representations of facial behaviors and cleaner, digital images. Other related tools for facial expression recognition training include the Micro Expression Training Tool (METT) and Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT), both developed by Paul Ekman.[43] The pioneer F-M Facial Action Coding System 3.0 (F-M FACS 3.0) [45] was created in 2018 by Dr. Freitas-Magalhães, and presents 5,000 segments in 4K, using 3D technology and automatic and real-time recognition (FaceReader 7.1). The F-M FACS 3.0 features 8 pioneering action units (AUs) and 22 pioneering tongue movements (TMs), in addition to functional and structural nomenclature.
Within the scope of its pioneering theory NeuroFACS 3.0, Dr. Freitas-Magalhães created the developed concepts of Neuromicroexpressions and Neuromacroexpressions [46][47].
In popular culture[edit]
Microexpressions and associated science are the central premise for the 2009 television series Lie to Me, based on discoveries of Paul Ekman. The main character uses his acute awareness of microexpressions and other body language clues to determine when someone is lying or hiding something.
They also play a central role in Robert Ludlum's posthumously published The Ambler Warning, in which the central character, Harrison Ambler, is an intelligence agent who is able to see them. Similarly, one of the main characters in Alastair Reynolds' science fiction novel, Absolution Gap, Aura, can easily read microexpressions.
In The Mentalist, the main character, Patrick Jane, can often tell when people are being dishonest. However, specific reference to microexpressions is only made once in the 7th and final season.
In the 2015 science fiction thriller Ex Machina, Ava, an artificially intelligent humanoid, surprises the protagonist, Caleb, in their first meeting, when she tells him 'Your microexpressions are telegraphing discomfort.'
Controversy[edit]
Though the study of microexpressions has gained popularity through popular media, studies show it lacks internal consistency[example needed] in its conceptual formation.[48]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2012). Microexpression and macroexpression. In V. S. Ramachandran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Vol. 2, pp. 173–183). Oxford: Elsevier/Academic Press. ISBN978-0-12-375000-6
- ^Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2019). Human Microexpressions: Brain, Face and the Emotion.Porto: FEELab Science Books. ISBN9789898766649
- ^'Empathy, emotion dysregulation, and enhanced microexpression recognition ability'. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
- ^'Background factors predicting accuracy and improvement in micro expression recognition'. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
- ^'Background factors predicting accuracy and improvement in micro expression recognition'. archive.is. 2011-07-15. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
- ^https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224160151_Facial_micro-expressions_recognition_using_high_speed_camera_and_3D-gradient_descriptor
- ^Ekman, Paul (1999). 'Basic Emotions'. In T. Dalgleish and M. Power (eds.). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.CS1 maint: uses editors parameter (link)
- ^Ekman, Paul (1992). 'Facial Expressions of Emotion: An Old Controversy and New Findings'. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. London. B335 (1273): 63–69. doi:10.1098/rstb.1992.0008.
- ^Haggard, E. A., & Isaacs, K. S. (1966). Micro-momentary facial expressions as indicators of ego mechanisms in psychotherapy. In L. A. Gottschalk & A. H. Auerbach (Eds.), Methods of Research in Psychotherapy (pp. 154–165). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
- ^Matsumoto, David (1992). 'More evidence for the universality of a contempt expression'. Motivation and Emotion. 16 (4). doi:10.1007/bf00992972.
- ^Ekman, P.; Friesen, W.V. (1971). 'Constants across cultures in the face and emotion'(PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 17 (2): 124–129. doi:10.1037/h0030377. PMID5542557.
- ^Ekman, Paul (1989). H. Wagner & A Manstead (ed.). Handbook of social psychophysiology. Chichester, England: Wiley. pp. 143–164. Chapter: The argument and evidence about universals in facial expressions of emotion.
- ^http://journals.lww.com/jonmd/Citation/1966/10000/Sound_Film_Analysis_of_Normal_and_Pathological.5.aspx Sound Film Analysis of Normal and Pathological Behavior Patterns, Condon, W.S.; Ogston, W.D., Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. 143(4):338–347, October 1966.
- ^'Research FAQs'. Gottman.com. The Gottman Institute. Retrieved 2013-10-26.
- ^Gottman, J.; Levenson, R.W. (2002). 'A Two-Factor Model for Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce: Exploratory Analyses Using 14-Year Longitudinal Data'. Family Process. 41 (1): 83–96. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.2002.40102000083.x. Archived from the original on 2013-01-05.
- ^Webber, Elizabeth; Feinsilber, Mike (1999). Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions. Merriam-Webster. pp. 519–. ISBN9780877796282. Retrieved 10 December 2012.
- ^TenHouten, W.D. (2007). General Theory of Emotions and Social Life. Routledge.
- ^Gladwell, Malcolm (2005). Blink, Chapter 1, Section 3, The Importance of Contempt
- ^ abhttp://www.cse.usf.edu/~mshreve/publications/FG11.pdf
- ^Godavarthy, Sridhar. 'Microexpression spotting in video using optical strain'. Web. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
- ^Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (2003). Unmasking the Face. Cambridge: Malor Books. p. 169
- ^Prof. Ragodí. 'Trabajo Psicología de 1er Trimestre.' El Bigote de Bernays. Blogspot. Updated 11-19-2009. Accessed 8-5-13. http://elbigotedebernays.blogspot.com/2009/11/trabajo-psicologia-1er-trimestre.html
- ^Braun, Roman. 'Eye Catcher.' Trinergy-NLP-Blog. Posted 10-27-2009. Accessed 8-5-13. 'Archived copy'. Archived from the original on 2013-12-13. Retrieved 2013-08-06.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
- ^'Thought Moments.' British Films Directory. British Council. Updated 12-1-2009.http://film.britishcouncil.org/thought-moments
- ^http://www.paulekman.com/products/
- ^Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (2003). Unmasking the Face. Cambridge: Malor Books. p. 12.
- ^Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (2003). Unmasking the Face. Cambridge: Malor Books. pp. 12–13.
- ^http://www.apa.org/research/action/glossary.aspx#e
- ^Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (2003). Unmasking the Face. Cambridge: Malor Books. p. 19.
- ^Ekman, P. (1991). Telling Lies Clues to deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., p. 56.
- ^Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (2003). Unmasking the Face. Cambridge: Malor Books. p. 20.
- ^Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (2003). Unmasking the Face. Cambridge: Malor Books. pp. 20–21.
- ^ abGoleman, Daniel (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.
- ^ abcGoleman, Daniel (2006). Social intelligence: the new science of human relationships. New York: Bantam Books.
- ^ ab'Detecting Deception from Emotional and Unemotional Cues'. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
- ^Boeree, George. 'The Limbic System'. webspace.ship.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
- ^'Cortisol | Hormone Health Network'. www.hormone.org. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
- ^'Interpreting Nonverbal Communication for Use in Detecting Deception'. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
- ^Matsumoto, D. (2010, March 21). Dr. David Matsumoto: How to Tell a Lie with the Naked Eye. Retrieved from Spying for Lying: 'Archived copy'. Archived from the original on 2013-05-28. Retrieved 2012-11-23.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
- ^Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2013). The Face of Lies. Porto: FEELab Science Books. ISBN978-989-98524-0-2
- ^Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray.
- ^ abBible, E. (2009, January 7). Smiles and frowns are innate, not learned. Retrieved from San Francisco State University: http://www.sfsu.edu/news/2009/spring/1.html
- ^ abhttp://www.paulekman.com/facs/
- ^'Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and the FACS Manual'. Face-and-emotion.com. Archived from the original on 2013-10-19. Retrieved 2013-10-26.
- ^Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2018). Facial Action Coding System 3.0: Manual of Scientific Codification of the Human Face. Porto: FEELab Science Books. ISBN978-989-8766-86-1.
- ^Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2018). Human Microexpressions: Brain, Face and the Emotion.Porto: FEELab Science Books. ISBN9789898766649
- ^Freitas-Magalhães, A. (2019). NeuroFACS 3.0: The Neuroscience of Face.Porto: FEELab Science Books. ISBN9789898766793
- ^http://pss.sagepub.com/content/19/5/508.abstract
Further reading[edit]
- Matthew Hertenstein (2015). The Tell: The Little Clues That Reveal Big Truths about Who We Are. Basic Books. ISBN978-0465036592.
External links[edit]
- Microexpressions Complicate Face Reading, by Medical News Today August 2007
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