Social Engineering Blogs

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Learning in Unlikely Faces

The facial expressions of a kombucha drinking social media poster might not be a national headline, but they serve a great example for learning about facial expressions.

As the New York Times reports, an online video by Brittany Tomlinson went viral after she showed a wide range of emotions upon trying some kombucha. In the video, Tomlinson tries her kombucha and proceeds to experience an apparent whirlwind of emotions: wincing, shaking her head, giggling, and smirking.

The verdict? “Low-key it’s kind of good, but it’s nasty,” she clarified.

So, why is this important if you are not contemplating trying kombucha yourself? In fact, the video contained in the Times article shows Tomlinson showcasing a rapid succession of easily identifiable facial expressions.

Dr. David Matsumoto was called in to comment on the exceptional nature of this video. While these cycles of expressions “go on all the time,” he said “you’re watching the person’s mind process in real time, which is really cool.”

Specifically, its “really cool,” because even laypeople can recognize emotions in her faces.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Dr. Dacher Keltner also agreed, calling this “an amazing sequence” which allowed “easy to see” facial expressions.

According to Keltner, Tomlinson showed five to seven clearly different emotions. Disgust is of course clearly available, but what else are you recognizing? Please don’t hesitate to sound off in the comments!

If you’re struggling, this article helps by breaking down the video frame by frame!

Why is that Funny?

Psychology often tries to unravel emotional mysteries, but some resist investigation more than others.

One of these long-standing mysteries is the reality of humor. What exactly makes a joke funny or not? And to whom? It is this question which has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers, and Scientific American’s Giovanni Sabato attempts to trace the history of theory and research on humor in a recent article.

Sabato delves into a long philosophical tradition, including the likes of Plato and Sigmund Freud, which has sought to model how humor works. While Plato and other ancient Greeks theorized that humor resulted from a sense of superiority over the failings of others, Freud made a great deal about the tendency for humor to thrive on the violation of taboos.

Another theory has focused on the idea of “incongruity.” Humor is derived from the subversion of expectations or the incompatibility of various concepts or situations. This helps explain the presence of double meanings and puns in humor, and it showcases the frequency with which humor deals with unexpected punchlines or resolutions to tricky situations.

The latter should be pretty intuitive to anyone who has watched a sitcom!

One more modern attempt to develop a unified theory of humor has built on that idea of incongruity. Drs. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, have introduced the idea of “benign violation.”

This theory focuses on humor being derived from violations of expectations surrounding norms. When somebody acts in a way that they are not supposed to, if it does not result in indignation or scandal, the situation will often be perceived as humorous.

There is also a role here for being distant from that particular, often awkward, violation. By hearing these stories second-hand from a comedian or friend, we have enough distance to find these situations funny.

However, this theory of distance and violation is not the only popular theory. Some psychologists and evolutionary biologists simply see humor as an evolutionary mechanism. Spontaneous and genuine laughter is deeply ingrained in our biology, while contrived and forced laughter developed as a way of smoothing social situations.

One way that humor can be derived from our hard-wired evolutionary experiences is related to the subversion of expectations. A group of philosophers, including Matthew Hurley of Indiana University Bloomington, saw humor as related to mistakes, or at least to their detection.

Our mind naturally assumes that it knows what will happen, relying on heuristics to predict likely events, but when things don’t happen as they should, for instance when another person acts erratically, we interpret that as humor.

None of these are necessarily perfect explanations for such a complex phenomenon. However, they help situate the question of humor into our cognitive and evolutionary history. From past blogs, we already know that emotional expressions are deeply rooted in evolution, and we know that properly reading people often depends on situating our experiences into these cognitive roots.

Professionalizing Facial Features

We know that facial expressions hugely shape social interactions, but they also shape professional evaluations, as well.

A recent blog by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) critically examines the extant research on the connection between nonverbal behavior and professional evaluations. This article seeks to summarize the role that facial features, such as facial hair, eyebrows, and head tilts, have on others’ perceptions.

Perhaps the least controllable of these are facial features like width, or more specifically, the ratio between the width of our face and its height. While this may seem ridiculous, past research has consistently found a relationship between perceived anti-social tendency and facial width.

However, as the APS points out, this perception fails to hold with people that we have actually gotten to know. Still, it says something about the immediate, almost instinctive, process of emotional and facial recognition.

While facial width is not mutable, facial hair certainly is, and beards can have profound impacts on people’s perceptions of us. For instance, bearded men are more likely to be perceived as angry than their clean-shaven counterparts, but they are less likely to be perceived as sad or happy.

Despite the association with aggression, beards can also relate to positive evaluations of professional competence.

Certainly, this does not seem like a logical evaluation, but it does not have to be in order to have significant impacts on perception. Another such feature is, even more absurdly, eyebrows!

The role of eyebrows connects closely to our blog from last week, as they are emphasized and deemphasized along with various head tilts, and we know that head tilts have significant impacts on perceived dominance and strength.

However, what may have been missing from the study we blogged on last week, is the role of eyebrows in the importance of head tilts. While that study emphasized the importance of the eyes in the process, APS cites research performed by University of British Columbia psychologists who found that the effect of head tilt actually disappeared when eyebrows were removed from the image.

While we know that microexpressions and a host of nonverbal behaviors have profound impacts on social interaction, it is also important to look at the role of actual facial features, like facial hair, symmetry, and even eyebrows. As this research shows, those can have profound impacts as well.

Certainly, as APS emphasizes, these impacts can carry into the professional world. Traits such as emotionality may result in less positive evaluations of one’s competence, while perceived dominance will likely have the opposite effect.

Yet, it is not only the professional world that makes these evaluations salient. Even everyday interaction can be profoundly shifted by whether we are perceived as angry, dominant, or happy. Often, we might not even be aware of these evaluations, making sustained efforts to learn how to best read people’s non-verbal behavior that much more important.