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Q & A, Dr. Matsumoto- Psychology, Emotion and Work

Education

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The Student Doctor Network recently did a Q & A with SFSU’s Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory director and Humintell’s Director Dr. David Matsumoto.

In this interview Dr. Matsumoto delved into the topics of psychology, microexpressions (one of of his specialties), and what his typical work day looks like.  He was asked questions such as, how and why did you choose the doctorate program you attended and what do you like least about being a psychologist.

For a sneak peek see some of his answers below.  For a more in depth look read the entire article.

What do you like least about being a psychologist?
I don’t like the politics and administrative work that are involved in doing my work. I definitely don’t like waiting to get the answer once I do a study. I could have an interesting research question and do a study, but it could take me two years to get the answer. It’s not something that I can get immediately, so I don’t like waiting because I’m kind of an impatient guy.

Describe a typical day at work—walk readers through a day in your shoes.
I’m up around 5:30 a.m. I’ll decide then if I’ll get up then and work or if I’m going to stay in bed for an extra 30 minutes and then get up. As soon as I wash up, I go straight to my study in my house. I write every morning, six days a week. Whether it’s a journal article, chapter, book, grant proposal, I’ll be writing, which is a creative activity for me. I’ll spend one and a half to three hours, six days a week, doing that with minimal interruptions and I have done that for over 30 years. After that time, I’ll take my dog for a walk and eat breakfast. From there I usually go to one of my offices and supervise work going on there. I’m generally always moving from one office to the next, usually doing work which requires coordinating with other people, such as seeing how data collection is going, analyzing data, etc. I take breaks here and there. In the evening I go home or go to judo practice at my dojo, the East Bay Judo Institute

On average: How many hours a week do you work? How many hours do you sleep per night? How many weeks of vacation do you take?
On average I work 12-hour days three times a week and 12- to 14-hour days the other days in the week. I work a total of about 70 hours a week. When I was coaching judo, I had much longer days. I usually sleep seven to seven and a half hours a night. I can’t remember a time in the past where I took a week vacation where I did absolutely nothing to do with work or judo. Even now when go on vacation, the longest being around 10 days, most mornings I keep writing. Instead of taking long vacation, I tend to rest my mind and body throughout the month. I look forward to not doing anything on Saturday afternoons or evenings. Micro breaks throughout the day work better for me.

Dr.Matsumoto’s best advice,  “…is to learn basic research methodology really well. Become a critical thinker and reader. Be a good scholar. Work hard.“

Decision Making- Logic or Emotion

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Courtesy of StockVault

Why can some people control their emotions so well and others seem to emotionally fall apart so quickly?   It’s often said “don’t make big decisions when you’re emotional”.  Many of us hold in high admiration the individuals that hold their emotions in check most of the time.  So is it really better to do this, or do emotions play a productive role in good decision making?

Fast Company.com published an article that notes that emotions are essential to making rational decisions.   So Spock like decision making might not be the best way to go.  According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s book Descartes’ Error,

 ”At best, your decision will take an inordinately long time, far more than acceptable if you are going to get anything else done that day.  At worst, you may not even end up with a decision at all because you will get lost in the byways of your calculation.“

Damasio purports that this is because you will not be able to hold in your head all the pluses and minuses your deliberation demands. Because attention and memory have limited supplies.  It’s emotions that make the myriad of cost calculations go faster.

The article goes on to note that it’s more of an emotional “gut” feeling when one is deciding on the best couple of courses of action out of the many possibilities.

Rather than scrutinizing every item of every menu, your feelings about what you’d like to eat allow you to skip over the pizza that you aren’t in the mood for. Similarly, your emotions help you with your career: if the thought of spending hours a day coding gives you the heebie-jeebies, then perhaps it’s best to avoid the developer bootcamps you’ve heard so much about.

In this way, emotions don’t get in the way of making smart decisions, they’re an integral part of that process.

Judgments of Subtle Facial Expressions of Emotion

Subtle Image DM siteDrs. David Matsumoto, Humintell’s director, and Hyisung Hwang continue their research into facial expressions of emotion with their latest research on judgments of subtle facial expressions of emotion.

Past Studies:
Previous studies on judgments of facial expressions of emotion have primarily utilized prototypical, high-intensity expressions. These are expressions that involve full-face configurations with contractions of muscles at high-intensity levels with no other muscle innervations.

This study: Subtle Facial Expressions of Emotion
This research examined judgments of subtle facial expressions of emotion, not only low-intensity versions of full-face prototypes, but also variants of those prototypes. It also examined how signal and intensity clarities of the expressions were associated with judgment-agreement levels.

Subtle facial expressions are not a new concept and were originally suggested over 30 years ago in the original version of the Facial Action Coding System Manual (FACS).  FACS is a technique for measuring any facial behavior including but not limited to emotional expressions.  It allows for the identification of each of the functionally independent muscle movements in the face.  There are roughly 40 AUs (action units) that are currently identifiable.

The seven universal facial expressions of emotion all have a listing of the proposed AU configurations for each expression including the proposed variants of each facial expression of emotion. However, there has not been an operational definition for subtle expressions that involve low-intensity and/or few appearance changes in the face.

There are two theories on the existence of subtle expressions:
1.      The first is that they are produced because of learned cultural and/or individual habits that modify the full-face, prototypic configurations.
2.    The second suggests that subtle expressions are produced as the result of a cumulative series of sequential checks in the appraisal process that can produce a wide variety of expressive configurations.

It is important to note that this study’s purpose was not to examine which theory is more accurate on the underlying reasons subtle expressions exist, but to identify which subtle expressions may have signal value as emotions.

The Study’s Findings:  Examination of variant expression obtained significantly greater-than-chance percentage-agreement rates of the intended emotion suggested potentially new facial configurations of subtle emotional expressions.

Low-intensity, full-face prototypical expressions of emotion were judged as the intended emotions at rates significantly greater than chance. A number of the proposed FACS variants were also judged as the intended emotions, as were a number of other proposed variants. Both signal and intensity clarities were individually associated with judgment-agreement rates; when their inter-relationships were taken into account.  However, signal clarity independently predicted agreement rates, but intensity clarity did not. The presence or absence of specific AUs appeared to be more important to agreement rates than their intensity levels, with the exception of the relationship between AU 12 and agreement rates for judgments of joy.

The data provided in this study highlights which expressions and AUs are associated with emotion judgments and thus are the likely candidates to be considered as signals of either modified innate programs or an appraisal process.

The current findings also demonstrate that signal clarity derived from combinations of specific AUs predicts emotion judgment-agreement rates, suggesting that signal clarity be taken into account in theories and studies of the role of context in emotion perception

To read more on Drs. Matsumoto & Hwang’s other research projects  click here.