ABOUT FACE!

RED FACES ABOUT READING FACES
How good or bad are we at reading faces? Research suggests that we are not very good at it. Research shows that we make many mistakes reading faces. This is true for a very simple reason. Research demonstrates that when listening to or looking at others, most people don't focus on the area of the face that will display true emotions. Thus, it is no wonder that we usually get it wrong. According to a study presented to a recent conference of the American Academy of Neurology, researchers found that most people focus on the lower part of the face when dealing with others. However, if the person's true feelings are "leaked" to the observer, they are more likely to appear on the upper face and could easily be missed. Previous studies have also shown that the lower portion of the face (i.e., the nose, lips, and cheeks) is more active than the upper face (i.e., the eyes, brows, and forehead) when individuals engage in deceitful social interactions. According to Dr. Calin Prodan, "Perhaps the old adage 'the eyes are the windows to the soul' may be correct," Dr. Prodan is a neurologist at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City and lead author of the study.

Dr. Prodan adds, "Humans learn in early childhood to manipulate facial emotions to make them appropriate to a given social situation which, in time, allows them to engage in deceitful behavior. For example, a person who is angry with their superior may display a 'social' smile rather than an angry scowl when asking for a raise." To better understand the brain's recognition and processing of facial emotion, the researchers briefly showed 30 people line drawings of a human face displaying different emotions on the upper versus lower face, including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and neutral. Participants viewed the drawings in either their right or left visual fields, which offered clues to the side of the brain processing the information and its ability to do so. Participants most often identified the lower face emotion, regardless of visual field. When subjects were instructed to focus on the upper face, they did so best when the pictures were shown to their left visual field (processed by the right side of the brain). However, most continued to identify the lower facial emotion when viewing in their right visual field (processed by the brain's left side).

Dr. Prodan notes that "Recognition of emotional displays on the lower face appear to be processed by the brain's left hemisphere as part of the social or learned emotional system. On the other hand, emotional displays on the upper face appear to be processed by the brain's right hemisphere as part of the primary or inborn emotional system." Dr. Prodan claims that "These findings help us to gain a better understanding of the neurological basis for affective communication, which will increase a physician's ability to assess how diseases, such as stroke and dementia, alter these functions."

Interestingly, it has been found that people may naturally focus on the lower face to aid in speech comprehension during conversation, especially in noisy environments. Social conventions may also play a role as many cultures consider it unacceptable to look someone directly in the eye--the "evil eye" belief immediately comes to mind. This may be interpreted as aggressive or threatening behavior, similar to those observed in some animal species. Dr. Prodan concludes, "There is a natural learning curve starting in early childhood for acquiring the skills to read facial displays of emotion. We certainly can train ourselves to pay more attention to upper facial displays, which can help us read a person's true emotional state. However, this can have a downside because of social conventions."

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A COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR READING FACES
A computer program has been developed to distinguish among a number of facial cues, helping to sort false from genuine expressions. What's more, the program performs as well as a psychologist trained to read faces and markedly better than human non-experts.

According to Dr. Terrence Sejnowski, head of the team of researchers who developed the program at the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, "Computers have a difficult time analyzing expressions on faces, something we can do without even thinking. But by mimicking the ability of humans to learn by experience, computers have now broken through this barrier."

The researchers hope that their program will prove helpful to law enforcement officials and mental health professionals.

According to the world's top authority on reading faces and a member of the Salk Institute team, Dr. Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California in San Francisco, "When someone is lying, their true feelings often flicker across their face in what we call a micro-expression, which is quickly covered up by a posed expression. These signals may be too brief for professionals to detect in an interview setting, but they can be picked up if the conversation is videotaped and reviewed."

In the latest study testing the program, a computer was "trained" to recognize six of 46 individual muscle actions described by Dr. Ekman as being significant in facial expressions. For all six actions, the program out-performed human non-experts and performed as well as highly trained human experts. The researchers plan next to teach the program the remaining actions and then tackle combinations of these actions.

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WOMEN SMILE MORE THAN MEN
Who smiles more, women or men?

According to a study just published by Dr. Marianne LaFrance, a psychologist at Yale University, "Women do smile more than men, but when occupying similar work and social roles, the gender differences in the rate of smiling disappear." Furthermore, Dr. LaFrance claims that "there are large differences in the degree to which men smile less than women depending on a person's culture, ethnicity, age, or when people think they are being observed.

Dr. LaFrances adds that "women do smile more than men, but the difference is modest. The difference is there, but it's not whopping. Indeed, there are studies that find just the opposite."

Reference: La France, M. Hecht, M. & Paluck, E. (2003) The Contingent Smile: A Meta-Analysis Of Sex Differences In Smiling. PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN 129:2:305-334.

 

 

Complete News Archives: 2003 February: Why we are all brothers and sisters January: The "Curse" That Won't Die 2002 December: Why is your face so red? November: How to be creative October: The Little Differences Between Men and Women September: The Mars Effect August: Weird mysteries of creative giants July: How many senses do we have? June: The Samson Syndrome May: Phantom Limb Syndrome April: Can we talk to the unborn? March: Movie Revelations February: Navel Secrets January: If Whales Can Do It? 2001 December: Body Odysseys of the Famous November: The Psychology of Smell October: Light, Colour and Music Therapy September: Three Brain Mysteries August: Baldness July News June: Laughing