An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields
Dateline NBC’s Josh Mankiewicz sat down with the man convicted of the 2004 double murder of Tom and Jackie Hawks. His interview with Skylar Deleon is below. While Deleon has admitted to committing the murders, he seems impassive (destitute of emotions) and quite conniving, showing a series of emotions and microexpressions.
What do you see in his interview below? Do you see any microexpressions?
Click here to view the embedded video.
Experts are not good at detecting deception according to the The Huffington Post and new research conducted by Professor of Applied Social Psychology, Aldert Vrij.
Dr. Vrij reveals that with an average accuracy rate of 56.6%, lies go undetected more than 1/3 of the time!
His latest research suggests that even trained professionals such as police and customs officers are no better than the average person at detecting deception.
Why are trained professionals not good at lie detection?
There are a plethora of reasons why professionals may not display a high accuracy rate for deception detection. Perhaps, they are only trained in one area of deception detection such as body language (excluding, micro facial expressions and/or statement analysis). Perhaps, they are just not trained often enough, that is there is an infrequency to their trainings; therefore, the review of their skills. It could even be that they were simply not trained properly and there is a misapplication of the skills that they learned.
Detecting inconsistencies in nonverbal behavior (including facial expressions and microexpressions) is a crucial skill that needs to be practiced often. As with many trainings, including Humitnell’s micro expression training, one should re-visit it often to remain agile in the core principles of that training.
We do not expect our trained soldiers or law enforcement agents to go out into the field without continuing to practice gun safety and execution. Like many other things in life, deception detection techniques should be practiced to be able to accurately and efficiently sift the truth from the lies.
Dr. Vrij goes on, in “How to Tell Who is Lying to You”, to note the two main ways to be a better lie detector are:
1. The Baseline Method: There is no one behavior that is universally characteristic of liars, but when any particular individual starts to stray from the truth, various cognitive, emotional and physiological processes kick in, which are possible to detect. However, you can only spot these if you already have the ‘baseline’ of how someone behaves when they are telling the truth
2. Devil’s Advocate: Interviewees are first asked questions inviting them to argue in favor of their personal view. This is followed by a Devil’s Advocate question that asks interviewees to argue against their personal view. The Devil’s Advocate Question is actually what they really believe, but are covering up. As we think more deeply about, and are more able to generate, reasons that support rather than oppose our beliefs, this leaks out during the answer to the Devil’s Advocate Question.
Dr. Matsumoto’s new book, Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications, marries the two worlds of knowing how to detect deception with putting that knowledge into practice.
What do you think about the information in this blog?
What is the top pertinent point that you would share with someone else?
The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is an incredibly useful tool when it comes to dealing with the face. Despite its utility, FACS is widely misunderstood. This post answers some of the common questions about FACS.
What is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS)?
The Facial Action Coding System is a scientific system designed to measure facial behaviors. Facial behaviors include individual facial movements such as pulling the eyebrows up, as well as more general facial activities like turns and tilts of the head. 1
How is FACS Used?
FACS can be used for several different things such as:
Describing expressions of emotion
Identifying between suicidal and non-suicidal patients 2
Predicting the onset and remission of depression 3
For computer generated animations 4
What is the Relationship Between FACS and Facial Expressions?
To understand how FACS and facial expressions relate, you need to know what facial expressions really are. Facial expressions are the way the face changes as a result of one or more facial movements (or more accurately, facial behaviors.) 5
FACS on the other hand is a system for measuring and describing one or more facial movements. Since a facial expression is composed of facial movements, FACS is a way to accurately describe the movements in a facial expression.
What is the Relationship Between FACS and Emotions?
This is one area where there is a lot of misinformation floating around the internet. To understand how FACS and emotions relate, you first need to understand how emotions relate to facial expressions.
There are seven emotional categories that have been scientifically proven to be universally recognizable. 6 These universally recognizable emotion categories (called the basic emotions) are associated with specific sets of facial expressions. 7
For example expressions of surprise are associated with the following movements:
The entire eyebrow is pulled up
The upper eyelids are pulled up
The mouth is opened
Since the basic emotions are associated with specific facial expressions, FACS can be used to accurately describe these expressions of emotion.
A very common misconception is that FACS is related to reading emotions. The problem with this is that FACS is just a measurement system, and does not interpret the meaning of the movements. It’s sort of like saying the purpose of driving a car is to go to the grocery store. You can use a car to go to the grocery store, but driving in and of itself can be used for several different things (e.g. driving to the movies, going across country, etc.)
Some sources incorrectly assume that FACS includes emotional interpretation. I suspect this is because they are confusing the FACS manual with the FACS Investigator’s Guide.
The FACS manual is what a FACS coder uses to learn FACS, and as a reference for coding. The FACS Investigator’s guide contains information such as reliability studies, how FACS compares to other measurement systems, etc. The FACS Investigator’s guide does briefly mention possible emotional interpretations for specific FACS codings, with this caveat in the preface:
It would be ideal if the person coding facial actions did not think about the possible meaning of the behavior he scores, but focused only on describing appearance. Information about th e meaning of facial behavior has been kept out of the Manual and is mentioned only in this Guide. 8
What is the Relationship Between FACS and Microexpressions?
Another common misconception about FACS is in regards to microexpressions. A microexpression is a brief (no more than 0.5 seconds) display of one of the seven basic emotions. So a microexpression is really nothing more than a facial expression of emotion. Granted it is very brief, but it’s still just a facial expression.
So to the relationship between FACS and microexpressions is the same for FACS and facial expressions: FACS can be used to describe the facial expressions that constitute a microexpression, but FACS in and of itself isn’t about microexpressions
Should I Learn FACS?
The question as to whether or not you should learn FACS is really about what you want to do, and the amount of effort 
you are willing to invest.
If you just want to get better at recognizing emotions, then FACS is probably overkill. Instead you should consider taking microexpression training. However if you need to be able to discern fine facial movements, then FACS is the best option.
Another thing to consider is how much time you are willing to invest. The average person will spend at least 100 hours studying the FACS manual, and then about 12 hours to take the FACS certification. To compare, microexpression training usually takes about an hour.
So if you want to be better at recognizing emotions, stick with microexpression training. If however you want to be an expert on the face, then becoming a FACS certified coder is what you need to do.
Fingerprint: 51055AAE836EC974E78DC0E66E03536C
Notes:
http://www.face-and-emotion.com/dataface/facs/new_version.jsp ↩http://www.facscodinggroup.com/about/facs ↩http://www.facscodinggroup.com/about/facs ↩FACSGen 2.0 ↩What Are Facial Expressions? ↩Three Mistakes People Make about the 7 Basic Emotions ↩People sometimes mistake universally recognized to mean universally experienced. While the basic emotions are universally experienced, they are not the only ones. Rather basic emotions are the only universally experienced emotions that are also associated with universally recognized facial expressions. ↩The FACS Investigator’s Guide ↩
Further reading:
The Facial Action Coding System Explained
Five Tips for Reading Facial Expressions
The Truth About Microexpressions