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Lack of Facial Expressions May Reveal Severe Depression

Doctors may soon be able to diagnose a severe form of depression, known as melancholia, simply by looking at someone’s (lack of) facial expressions.

According to VeryWell Mind, melancholia is a form of major depressive disorder (MDD) that is characterized by a complete loss of pleasure in all or almost everything.

In addition, research has found that people with melancholic depression have a higher risk for unemployment, psychotic features, inpatient treatment, and suicide risk than people with non-melancholic depression

It is estimated by researchers that about 5-10% of people who are depressed have melancholia – which could represent as many as 2 million Americans.

Depression and Facial Expression Study

The study entitled “Markers of positive affect and brain state synchrony discriminate melancholic from non-melancholic depression using naturalistic stimuli” was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Author Dr. Philip Mosley and colleagues showed 70 depressed people, 30 of whom had melancholia and 40 of whom did not, two different videos.

  • Video 1 was a clip from Ricky Gervais‘ stand up comedy set ‘Animals,’ which involved funny skits about nature documentaries.
  • Video 2 was a short film called The Butterfly Circus, which features a moving story about a circus troupe inspiring hope in Depression-era America.

While the patients watched the videos, their facial and brain activity was recorded, the former with a camera to track every minute muscle twitch during the Gervais set, the latter with the patient in an MRI machine while watching The Butterfly Circus.

Depression Study Results

The difference between the two patient sets was stark. For the Gervais video, although the patients with non-melancholic depression were still depressed, they did respond with facial expressions and giggles.

Meanwhile, the patients with melancholic depression were completely impassive. Mosley describes them like “statues” with “no facial movement at all, no smiling, no chuckling.”

Severe 'Melancholia' Depression Could Be Diagnosed by Facial Expression

Something similar happened in the MRI machine. The brains of patients with non-melancholic depression lit up, particularly in the cerebellum, which is involved with automatic emotional responses.

“With people with melancholic depression,” Mosley said, “those emotional regions of the brain – the ones involved in detecting and responding to stimuli with an emotional tone – were just doing their own thing, disconnected, not integrated with the rest of the brain, not involved in processing with other regions of the brain that are relevant in these tasks.”

Depression Study Implications

This study’s discovery could help doctors differentiate between melancholia and regular depression earlier. While melancholia is a more severe condition, it’s still treatable.

Dr. Mosley suggests these patients don’t tend to respond well to traditional talk therapy, so diagnosing them early could also help establish a more tailored treatment plan for them.

If a person with the condition is diagnosed early, most respond very well to medications, which work to balance the chemistry of the brain. And quicker treatment can help them avoid the most invasive therapies that may be required if the condition has progressed.

The post Lack of Facial Expressions May Reveal Severe Depression first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.

To Be A Better Negotiator, Show More Facial Expressions

Listen to Dr. Matsumoto on Negotiate Anything Podcast

You may think that in a tough negotiation you need a good poker face, but recent research suggests that being pleasant and facially expressive could actually yield you better results.

Researchers out of Nottingham University in the UK collected data from over 1500 conversations while paying close attention to movements in the face like smiles, eyebrow raises, and nose wrinkles.

Their paper was published in Nature and is entitled “Being facially expressive is socially advantageous”.

They found that people who displayed more facial expressions were seen as more likable and socially successful.

Lead researcher Dr. Bridget Waller said this could explain why humans have more complex facial expressions than any other species.

Negotiation Study Methodology

In Study 1, the researchers recorded semi-structured video calls with 52 participants interacting with a confederate across various everyday contexts.

The researchers showed recorded clips of conversations to more than 170 people and asked them to rate how “readable” (in terms of emotions and expressions) and likable the subjects were in the videos.

In Study 2, they examined video calls of 1315 participants engaging in unscripted Zoom chats.

Facial expressivity indices were extracted using automated Facial Action Coding Scheme (FACS) analysis and measures of personality and partner impressions were obtained by self-report.

Negotiation Study Results

interview-office-meeting-greeting-hand-shakeIn Study 1, more facially expressive participants were more well-liked, agreeable, and successful at negotiating (if also more agreeable).

Participants who were more facially competent, readable, and perceived as readable were also more well-liked.

In Study 2, they replicated the findings that facial expressivity was associated with agreeableness and liking by their social partner, and additionally found it to be associated with extraversion and neuroticism.

These characteristics are part of the five most significant personality dimensions (the Big Five) identified by psychologists, which enable them to characterize personality differences between individuals in a comprehensive way:

  • Openness: willingness to adopt new ideas, experiences and values
  • Conscientiousness: dependability, punctuality, ambitiousness and discipline
  • Extraversion: sociability, assertiveness, adventurousness, dynamism and friendliness
  • Agreeableness: willingness to trust others, good natured, outgoing, obliging, helpful
  • Neuroticism (Emotional stability): self-confidence, equanimity, positivity, self-control

According to the study’s abstract, “these findings suggest that facial behavior is a stable individual difference that proffers social advantages, pointing towards an affiliative, adaptive function”.

Study Implications

This is the first large-scale study to examine facial expression in real-world interactions and researchers say it suggests that more expressive people are more successful at attracting social partners and in building relationships.

The work is part of a project known as Facediff (Individual differences in facial expressivity: Social function, facial anatomy and evolutionary origin), which is funded by the European Research Council.

Detecting Deception in Negotiation

Detecting Deception in Negotiation

Negotiations Ninja featured Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto on their podcast to discuss detecting deception in negotiation!

During the episode Dr. Matsumoto shares his insights on how to read facial expressions, emotions, and intent. For those in negotiation, it’s sometimes difficult to understand what a person is actually feeling or thinking when they’re engaging face-to-face.

Dr. Matsumoto shares the research on less obvious facial expressions a procurement professional may encounter along the way. He’s sharing research into micro-expressions including what they are, what they reveal about the person, and how they communicate with the brain.

This is a fascinating conversation about everything from discipline in judo, to the way our approximately 23 facial muscles work, to his number one tip for professionals – active observation.

The post To Be A Better Negotiator, Show More Facial Expressions first appeared on Humintell.

Research: Dogs Wag Their Tails To Make Us Happy

It’s amazing you can form such a strong bond with an animal who communicates with you exclusively non-verbally.

If you’re a dog owner, you know the joy of walking in through the door to be greeted by your pup excitedly wagging their tail.

But did you know that dogs are one of the few animals that use their tails primarily for communication?

Despite this fact, scientists still don’t understand exactly why dogs wag their tails. In a new paper published in the journal Biology Letters, researchers outline a few theories.

Most people equate tail wagging with a happy dog, but reality may be more complicated.

Take a look at more research out of the Canine Cognition Center here

There are many possible hypothesis for why dogs wag their tails and a couple of them are listed below.

1. Domestication Syndrome Hypothesis

This hypothesis relates to the human domestication of dogs, which began as early as 35,000 years ago.

Perhaps tail-wagging was a behavior that humans unintentionally selected for, because it was linked with other preferable traits, like tameness or friendliness toward people.

Tail-wagging may have simply been a byproduct of other specifically targeted characteristics.

2. Domesticated Rhythmic Wagging

This hypothesis suggests that humans consciously or unconsciously selected for tail-wagging during domestication, because they are drawn to rhythmic stimuli.

Tail Wagging 101

The new paper adds to the big-picture understanding of what scientists do and don’t know about tail-wagging.

The authors reviewed more than 100 studies about the behavior and summarized their findings: humans likely altered dogs’ tail wagging without realizing it.

According to the Washington Post, “the findings could flip the long-held belief that dogs are wagging their tails because they’re happy. Instead, Hersh and her colleagues suggest that dog tail-wags made people happy, so humans tended to select for that trait when welcoming dog ancestors into their lives and breeding the animal.”

Messages Conveyed by Tail-Wagging

Dogs also seem to wag their tails in different ways to convey different messages.

  • Wagging more to the right means a dog is curious and wants to approach
  • Wagging to the left is correlated with uncertainty
  • Low tail wagging—where dogs pin their tails down against their back legs—is also linked with insecurity and submission

Interestingly, a study found that dogs began wagging their tails more than wolves when they were as young as three weeks old. And another study found that dogs wag their tails faster and more often than other canines.

Domestication of Dogs

Scientists have found that dozens of dogs’ traits and behaviors changed during domestication, including the appearance of their fur, ears, body size — and even their ability to make “puppy-dog eyes.”

In fact, eyebrows give dogs a wider range of human-like facial expressions we can identify with and they play a vital role in how dogs became “man’s best friend.”

Evolutionary psychologists even believe that centuries of domestication “transformed the facial muscle anatomy of dogs specifically for facial communication with humans”.

The post Research: Dogs Wag Their Tails To Make Us Happy first appeared on Humintell.