Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Exciting new research about microexpressions!

Although microexpressions are analogous to longer-lasting ones in many ways, it is in their differences that much of the latest exciting science dwells.

Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang recently published an analysis of a major study, Shen et al. (2016), which sought to contrast fleeting microexpressions from those that lasted longer than 200 milliseconds. This analysis helps situate readers into the contemporary research on microexpressions and the importance of seeing them as a discrete phenomenon from longer-lasting expressions.

Shen et al. found that microexpressions, i.e. those that only lasted 40 to 120 milliseconds, were perceived quite similarly but were perceived quite distinctly from expressions which lasted longer. Of course, longer is relative here at only 200 milliseconds!

These findings, as Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang contend, have four major implications on the study of emotions and microexpressions.

The first of these is the importance of the 200 millisecond threshold. This fits well with research Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang completed two decades ago which emphasized that that once an expression is held for 200 ms it tends to be processed in observers’ short-term memories. This is one of the crucial distinction between everyday expressions and the more fleeting and unconscious microexpressions which Humintell studies.

Both this study and Humintell’s work support a definition of microexpressions that includes only those expressions which occur more quickly than half a second. While this has been controversial in the literature for some time, it seems clear that around this threshold stand distinctive psychological phenomena. Another interesting thing to note: Humintell was prescient in this by defining microexpressions more than a decade ago as those that occurred less than half a second. Humintell’s definition has been different from claims used by others that are not validated.

Second, this research contributes to the importance of finding neurological correlates to the perception of microexpressions. This has been extensively studied for longer-lasting facial expressions, but only a handful of studies have looked at the neurological reaction to fleeting microexpressions.

Shen et al. found that even hard-wired universal emotions, which we know have a significant biological basis, are still processed through culturally-taught rules, values, and associations, even when processing microexpressions.

Third, these neurological correlates also show how distinctive microexpressions are. Shen et al.’s research concluded that the neurological correlates for microexpressions differ significantly from longer lasting expressions. This leads to lasting questions about how expression duration can be used to study different types of expressions, such as the difference between voluntary or involuntary expressions, for instance.

Finally, this study and many others contribute to a growing field that seeks to understand deception detection. Microexpressions can often betray those seeking to lie. The ability to see those microexpressions is hard and demands training or practice. Still, it is important to note that individual differences, such as personality characteristics, can make this harder or easier.

Overall, this piece is an important addition to a growing body of literature seeking to understand microexpressions and their ramifications for deception detection.

We are very interested to hear what you think! What do you find compelling in terms of future questions? Where would you drive this research if you could? What do you think about these assertions?

READ THE FULL ABSTRACT AND DOWNLOAD THE FULL ARTICLE

Landmarks in the Field of Nonverbal Behavior

We spend a great deal of time talking about Humintell’s work on nonverbal behavior, but it’s important to know that this is a wide and exciting field!

In a recent paper in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, a pair of researchers sought to map out the major authors and major papers that have dominated the field. Instead of just looking at new developments, this was an important way of seeing what the lay of the land in the field is, so to speak, and this sort of work is incredibly valuable to those trying to expand the field and to those trying to understand the academic consensus.

One of the exciting features of this research was also an analysis of the most frequently cited and published scholars in the field. We were proud to see Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto listed in the top five scholars!

In mapping the discipline, Drs. Pierrich Plusquellec and Vincent Denault leveraged a massive bibliographic database that included more than 200 million articles from thousands of journals, not limited to psychology. However, they subset this database to a series of important keywords that were relevant to nonverbal behavior and folded in citation counts to each article to determine its importance.

The first intriguing finding was a calculation of the most common words used in the titles of relevant articles. This tells us what most scholars tend to focus on and included “emotion,” “facial,” “expressions,” and “recognition.” However, these were often paired with applications including “children,” “psychiatric illness,” and “depression.”

Second, the study authors also tracked the frequency of highly cited articles over time. By looking only at the thousand most cited articles, they were able to track the development of seminal works and the emergence of increased interest in the field. They found that the field emerged during the 1960s but that most of these articles were actually quite recent.

This last finding indicates that, while the field has been developing for over 50 years, it has gained newfound emphasis and popularity recently.

These over-time findings were further explored by looking at how frequently used words over time, i.e. which words were most frequent during given decades. “Facial expression” tends to be one of the most frequent across the whole time period, though this was not so pronounced until the 1990s and 2000s.

So what exactly does this tell any of us about the field?

A main takeaway seem to be the primacy of studying facial expressions within nonverbal behavioral studies, which is notably different from looking at body language or even microexpressions more narrowly.

Another important conclusion is also the exciting nature of the current period of this field. It appears that the last 15 years have experience a sharp increase in interest, academic and otherwise, in nonverbal behavior, and we are optimistic that this trend continues!

Farming and the Evolution of Speech

As we know, many of our nonverbal behaviors have deep roots in our own process of evolution, but maybe our verbal behaviors have historical roots too.

While perhaps not quite as deeply ingrained as biological evolution, a new study in Science found evidence that many of our speech patterns can be linked back to changing dietary practices due to the dawn of agriculture. Specifically, our use of sounds like “F” and “V” can be linked to changing jaw and overbite structures that arose around that time.

Postdoctoral researchers Damián Blasi and Steven Moran got their idea from 34 year old linguistic analyses that found that contemporary hunter-gatherers lacked some of the linguistic types, called labiodentals, that many agricultural based people had.

When humans became accustomed to chewing foods high in fibers, the jaw bone is put under pressure and molars are worn down. This results in a more even mouth, developing away from an overbite and also making it easier to pronounce sounds like “F” and “V”.

While this idea may have some intuitive credibility, such an attitude was not shared in linguistic communities when linguist Charles Hockett made these unusual observations. Instead, he was met with skepticism, and it was that skepticism that Blasi and Moran sought to validate by proving Hockett wrong.

But they were very surprised. In order to assess Hockett’s claim, they made use of computer models to simulate how the human mouth makes sounds with varying degrees of overbite, and they analyzed languages around the world to see which languages most frequently used labiodental sounds.

The results are incredible striking. The computer models indicate that overbites make labiodental sounds much harder, with contemporary edge-to-edge teeth reducing the necessary effort by almost 30 percent.

Similarly, they discovered that labiodentals were much less common among languages used by hunter-gatherer communities. What might be most striking about these findings is the fact that they were able to track the progress of labiodentals emerging in languages throughout history, finding a steady increase in their use as societies developed and became more focused on expansive settled agriculture.

It is not all good news for those of us who enjoy our labiodentals, as we are also more at risk of cavities and of our teeth becoming overcrowded.

However, this study makes important strides in tracking how our communicative patterns are closely tied to our evolution and to our society. This is important if you are trying to better understand people of different cultures.

For instance, this study shows certain commonalities among those who speak Indo-European languages, emphasizing cross-cultural similarities. Yet, on the other hand, the fact that these speech patterns only emerged because of certain social arrangements also shows how deep the communicative gap can be between people of different cultures.

Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to better read people and communicate across cultural divides. This is one of Humintell’s specialties, and we even offer a cross-cultural training class!