Kim Philby

This is a video of Kim Philby, who at the time of this video was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union. The "Third Man" refers to a person believed to have tipped off two other British spies so that they escaped arrest by defecting to the USSR.

Watch for the micro-expressions appearing after Philby answers two questions.

Casey Anthony

Watch for the brief almost-smile that appears on Casey Anthony's face as she comes through the door and sees the media waiting for her. After that her face goes blank and she drops her gaze to the floor for a moment before looking ahead again.

What the Facial Action Coding System can tell us here is that she DOES smile for a brief moment. However, is this micro-expression of happiness a sign that she is guilty? Definitely not. Although a smile might seem to be a very odd reaction in this situation, it could be prompted by nervousness, or even fright. Sometimes people do smile when they are nervous (ever seen someone get the giggles at a funeral or other "serious" occasion?).

It's also important to remember that we do not know what she is looking at when she smiles. We know the media is there (you can hear them asking questions), but we do not know who or what else is in her line of sight. The smile could be prompted by something she is seeing, by relief at leaving, by excitement to see all the people waiting for her...the list is endless.

Why is This Man Smiling?

The following picture is from the New York Times - the man is smiling (a real smile, involving the eyes), but those around him are not. What do you think is happening?



A young movie star with his bodyguards stepping onto the red carpet? Or a suspect in international piracy arriving to the US court in manacles?

You may remember one of Amy's video from the workshop showing murder suspect Casey Anthony entering a room, handcuffed, flashing a smile at the reporters and photographers assembled there. Are these the smiles of narcissistic sociopaths delighting in their crimes? Or are we so conditioned to smile at experiencing such strong attention (name called, photos) that we can't help it? Or, is it something else entirely?

Paul Ekman grades "Lie to Me"--the show he inspired

Reading Between The Lies
By Marc D. Allan
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, July 12, 2009

With the first season of "Lie to Me" completed, Paul Ekman is ready to assign grades to the Fox drama he inspired:

A-minus for entertainment value, B-plus for realism.

Ekman, a professor emeritus at the University of California at San Francisco and a social psychologist who works in the area of deception and demeanor, said 85 percent of what "Lie to Me" depicts is accurate.

"Baum does care to get it right," Ekman said.

He was speaking of Samuel Baum, who created the show after learning about Ekman's work using facial expressions and verbal tics to help determine whether someone is telling the truth.
"I thought a franchise set around someone who did that kind of work would give real scope to the kinds of cases you could explore -- one week a political thriller, one week a family drama," Baum said. "A little movie every week."

He centered the show on a character named Cal Lightman (played by Tim Roth), an in-your-face investigator who leads a firm that helps law enforcement and government agencies.
The Lightman Group -- partner Gillian Foster (Kelli Williams), newcomer Ria Torres (Monica Raymund) and researcher Eli Loker (Brendan Hines) -- is typically hired to investigate crimes. But occasionally its clients are people such as a multimillionaire who wants to know whether his fiancee really loves him.

Read the rest of the article at the Washington Post

Anxiety and Othello's Error

In her workshop, Amy discussed the importance of avoiding "Othello's Error" when interpreting facial expressions, which Paul Ekman described in a 2004 interview:

But the emotion doesn't tell you its source. Otherwise, you'll make "Othello's error." Othello killed Desdemona because he thought that her signs of fear were of a woman caught in a betrayal. She was afraid of being disbelieved. The fear of being disbelieved looked just like the fear of being caught. Fear is fear. You have to find out which it is. That's a little disappointing, because people would like to think, "Oh, if you look afraid, that means you did it." No, it doesn't mean that; it means you're afraid.
Paul Ekman Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

A study published in the August 2006 Journal of Personality indicates that people with anxiety tended to be faster to perceive changes facial expressions than a control group, but that they also tended to jump to conclusions about the source of the emotions more quickly as well, introducing significant errors of perception.

Interestingly, when the anxious individuals were asked to take a longer period to link expressions to possible emotional states, they tended to perform more accurately than the control. Teaching people with anxiety to take this time may be important - in the press release from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, lead author, R. Chris Fraley, states:

“This ‘hair trigger’ style of perceptual sensitivity may be one reason why highly anxious people experience greater conflict in their relationships,” Fraley said. “The irony is that they have the ability to make their judgments more accurately than less-anxious people, but, because they are so quick to make judgments about others’ emotions, they tend to mistakenly infer other people’s emotional states and intentions."

Not-So-Neutral Neutral Faces

The April Edition of the Journal Emotion is full of wonderful "face-based" research. One that particularly caught my eye was how having a neutral face that has some of the features of a facial expression can affect the way you are perceived, rather strikingly:

Structural resemblance to emotional expressions predicts evaluation of emotionally neutral faces. Said, C., et. al.

People make trait inferences based on facial appearance despite little evidence that these inferences accurately reflect personality. The authors tested the hypothesis that these inferences are driven in part by structural resemblance to emotional expressions. The authors first had participants judge emotionally neutral faces on a set of trait dimensions. The authors then submitted the face images to a Bayesian network classifier trained to detect emotional expressions. By using a classifier, the authors can show that neutral faces perceived to possess various personality traits contain objective resemblance to emotional expression. In general, neutral faces that are perceived to have positive valence resemble happiness, faces that are perceived to have negative valence resemble disgust and fear, and faces that are perceived to be threatening resemble anger. These results support the idea that trait inferences are in part the result of an overgeneralization of emotion recognition systems. Under this hypothesis, emotion recognition systems, which typically extract accurate information about a person's emotional state, are engaged during the perception of neutral faces that bear subtle resemblance to emotional expressions. These emotions could then be misattributed as traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

Those of you who took the workshop may remember a couple of the Ekman Microexpressions Training Tool faces that already had a strong "sad" or one-sided "contempt" neutral expression, and some participants stated that they found those faces confusing. Do you know of people who have identifiable "emotional expressions" in their neutral faces? Has it ever affected the way you interact with them?

What a Nod Says

Do we "thin-slice" body language to quickly gauge someone's socioeconomic status? Some preliminary research indicates what many of us know as common TV tropes -- the eager young striver, the bored, contemptuous socialite -- bears itself out with body language during stranger interactions. Not only do those with lower SES show more engagement behavior and those with higher SES less in this study, third parties were more likely (than chance) to recognize and assign SES correctly after watching these interactions.

A lay media piece can be found at Muzi.com: Body Language Reveals Wealth

They found that students whose parents were from higher socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds engaged in more of what he called "impolite" behaviors, such as grooming, doodling and fidgeting. Lower SES students showed more "I'm interested" gestures, including laughter and raising of the eyebrows.

The full text of the original article is available at the journal Psychological Science, Jan 2009: Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A Thin-Slicing Approach

ABSTRACT—Socioeconomic status (SES) is a primary determinant of health vulnerabilities and social affiliations. To ascertain if SES is signaled in brief patterns of nonverbal behavior, we had participants of varying SES backgrounds engage in a brief interaction with a stranger. Videos of 60-s slices of these interactions were coded for nonverbal cues of disengagement and engagement, and estimates of participants' SES were provided by naive observers who viewed these videos. As predicted by analyses of resource dependence and power, upper-SES participants displayed more disengagement cues (e.g., doodling) and fewer engagement cues (e.g., head nods, laughs) than did lower-SES participants. Results were also consistent with the thin-slicing literature, in that observers' estimates of SES were reliable with each other and accurately predicted targets' family income, maternal education, and subjective SES. Finally, nonverbal displays of disengagement and engagement predicted observers' estimates of SES, which suggests that these cues are systematic signs of SES. These results have implications for understanding the effect of SES on social interactions and patterns of disengagement and engagement in other realms.

While it's worth noting that they couldn't mask from the researchers or the naive third parties other SES "tells" like accents, clothing, accessories, or word choice, the study is still intriguing. When you are people watching, look for non-mirrored nods and laughs, or doodles and self-grooming during conversation - do they tell you something about the status (socioeconomic or other) of the participants? When you meet with your supervisor, who nods more?

Analysis of Body Language - Joe Navarro

Once you start looking at this stuff, you can't stop! Where in the past a flight delay may have made you frown like the rest, now you can kick back and enjoy the smorgasboard of body language available to you in the airport, or anywhere else humans gather and you have a spare moment.

Below, Joe Navarro talks with Ann Curry about decoding body language in pictures and video:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(Sorry for the heaping helping of US politicians - but they are a body language gold mine!)

Is Facial Motion the Key?

If you took Amy's workshop, you may have eventually found yourself looking for some tell-tale movements as a neutral face picture changed to one with a specific expression. The start of the wrinkles around the nose denoting disgust, or the lengthening of a face showing surprise, as the eyebrows arch and the jaw drops.

The Science Daily article "The Enigmatic Face: Motion Is The Key To Understanding Expressions" cites a study that seems to indicate that it's not so much seeing the finished facial expression that triggers our recognition, but rather our experience of the movement of the face in the direction of that expression - meaning that we may be detecting, and reacting to, these expressions even more quickly than we realize!