Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Left Vs Right: The Complexity of the Brain

New research is shedding light on how the left analytical and right creative hemispheres of the human brain work together in processing our visual world.

The fascination of how the brain process objective information is not new to the scientific scene.  Many TV shows such as Lie to Me and court drama series have been zeroing in on this via micro facial expressions of emotion and body language.

Assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, Ming Meng has come up with some interesting findings in regards to the brain’s organization of these two categories and the possible role they play in autism.

Meng uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), computer vision, and psychophysics to delve into the function of the brain and the processes of our visual world.

EurekaAlert.com commented on Meng and his colleague’s reserach, which was published on January 4th in the Proceedings of Royal Society B (online edition).  Meng’s research focused on how the brain is organized to process visual information particularly the human face.

“We needed to study the full spectrum; the stimuli that make an image look like a face but not necessarily a face. These results would show the subtle differences between the left and right side of the brain as they dealt with this range of images.” Meng noted.  Looking at how the brain processes faces is Meng’s key to unlocking the mysteries of the left brain/right brain paradigm.

The findings of his study as well as similar studies on the face shed light into the complex world of autism, people with face processing deficits, which also make understanding and recognizing emotions difficult.  Meng posits that the reason for social interaction problems especially among autistic children could be a problem with face perception.

“Our results suggest the left side of the brain is processing the external physical input which resolves into a ‘grey scale’ while the right brain is underlying the final decision of whether or not it is a face.”

What are your thoughts on this study?  Do you think it is compounding upon new information or just restating old facts?

Emotion: The Sixth Sense

Research by Tilburg University scientists, in the Netherlands,  reveals insight into the brain’s ability to interpret the outside world.

Blind-sight:  A phenomena where some blind people can “see” emotions in others faces was analyzed.  The research revealed that some emotions are deeply rooted in our brain and not just available to our visual sense of sight.

In September, we wrote a blog entitled “Eyeless Emotions“  about this research by Tilburg scientists.  Watch the video below to learn more about this fascinating revelation.

Thanks to Non-Verbal.info for the video idea!

Click here to view the embedded video.

What Are Facial Expressions?

Facial expressions are a vital part of communication. What’s funny is that most people talk about facial expressions, but they don’t really know what they are. This post examines what facial expressions are in the context of nonverbal communication.

Facial Movements

Before we can even get into what facial expressions are, we have to understand the idea of “facial movements”. A facial movement is the movement of one or more facial muscles. 1 For example the zygomatic major muscles contract to pull the lip corners up and back towards the ear when a person smiles. You can see the contraction of the zygomatic major muscles in the image below.

Zygomatic Major: Smiling Man

The lip corners are pulled up by contraction of the zygomatic major muscle

The mapping between facial movements and facial muscles is not one-to-one. Some facial movements involve contraction of two different parts of the same muscle, while others involve contraction of multiple muscles. The muscle that controls the raising of the eyebrows is called the occipitofrontalis (or just frontalis) and the inner portions can be raised independently of the outer portions. Facial expressions of sadness often include raising of just the inner portion of the eyebrows, while expressions of surprise include raising the inner and outer portions of the eyebrows. You can see this in the two images below:

 

Sad Facial Expression

Just the inner corners of the eyebrows have been raised

Surprise Facial Expression

Both the inner and outer portions of the eyebrows are raised

Facial Expressions

Now that we know what facial movements are, we can focus on understanding what facial expressions are. As we make various facial movements (i.e. contract and relax our facial muscles) the appearance of our faces change. In the image above, as the lip corners are pulled back and up the cheeks will puff up, the mouth will lengthen etc.

Using this idea we can answer “what are facial expressions?” from the perspective of nonverbal communication:

Facial expressions are the observable results of moving one or more facial muscles, or parts thereof.

So facial expressions are the resulting changes in facial appearance due to one or more facial movements. The key to this definition is that a facial expression is relates to what you can observe. This implies that facial expressions are separate from what they are used for.

Now some people might be thinking “whoa, I thought facial expressions communicated emotions?” The answer is that facial expressions can be used to communicate emotions, but they can also be used for other purposes as well. For instance here are three examples of when people might raise their eyebrows:

During expressions of surprise
To emphasize particular parts of speech
As a greeting

In all three cases the eyebrow raising (i.e. the expression) is the same but the intent and purpose behind it differs.

So when you’re reading a person’s nonverbals, realize that their facial expressions may not always communicate what you think they do.

Fingerprint: FA51BD0B6EB16C44AA763D6AF8FC05D3

Notes:

In the Facial Action Coding System these are called action units (AUs). ↩

Further reading:

The Facial Action Coding System Explained