Taken from Humintell Affiliate, Susan Constantine’s website:

Orlando, FL – March 20, 2015 – ATM surveillance photos taken in Warwick, Rhode Island in October 2014 and subsequently released by the city’s police department are currently garnering much attention. There is interest in determining whether they show Ashley Summers, the girl who went missing from her Cleveland home at the age of 14 back on July 9, 2007.

There were no witnesses to offer an account of what happened to Summers, and for eight years, no leads have yielded answers and her disappearance has remained unsolved. Now, the FBI has taken an interest in the ATM photos, publicized in relation to a string of ID thefts, after being alerted to them by Summers’ step-grandmother. She believes the woman in the pictures bears a striking resemblance to her missing step-granddaughter. Many agree, and the woman is also said to closely resemble computer-generated images of what Summers would look like now, at age 21.

As the FBI works to analyze the new evidence that may establish Summers is still alive, the Dr. Phil show invited Susan Constantine, MPsy, a leading body language and facial recognition expert, to provide her own analysis while appearing alongside the Summers family. She herself has trained law enforcement personnel in reading body language and detecting deception, and is a frequent guest on national television programs offering body language analysis of public figures, court testimonies and more.

On Monday, March 23, Constantine appeared on the Dr Phil Show and applied her expertise to comparing these most recent images to those of the girl prior to her disappearance. She draws on extensive experience in facial mapping and expressions to draw a conclusion as to whether or not the young woman seen in these surveillance photos are in fact Ashley Summers, eight years after her mysterious disappearance.

Constantine’s analysis does more than shed light on how these images affect the famously dead-ended case of the missing girl from Cleveland, though. Her appearance also offers fascinating insights into how law enforcement professionals evaluate, compare, contrast, and “read” images to determine whether they offer solid evidence to support theories and hunches.

Watch Constantine decipher the clues provided by facial recognition techniques and examining body language, and hear her verdict on Dr. Phil.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Courtesy of StockVault

New brain research suggests that humiliation is the strongest emotion a human can feel.

Wired.com reports on this claim and delves into the question of, Is humiliation really more intense than other negative emotions such as anger or shame?

The researchers, Marte Otten and Kai Jonas, conducted two studies in which dozens of male and female participants read short stories involving different emotions, and had to imagine how they’d feel in the described scenarios.

The first study compared humiliation (e.g. your internet date takes one look at you and walks out), anger (e.g. your roommate has a party and wrecks the room while you’re away) and happiness (e.g. you find out a person you fancy likes you). The second study compared humiliation with anger and shame (e.g. you said some harsh words to your mother and she cried).

The researchers used EEG (electroencephalography) to record the surface electrical activity of their participants’ brains. They were interested in two measures in particular – a larger positive spike (known as the “late positive potential” or LPP); and evidence of “event-related desynchronization,” which is a marker of reduced activity in the alpha range. Both these measures are signs of greater cognitive processing and cortical activation.

The study’s finding was that imagining being humiliated led to larger LPPs and more event-related desychronization than the other emotions. According to Otten and Jonas, this means that humiliation, more than the other emotions they studied, leads to a mobilization of more processing power and a greater consumption of mental resources. “This supports the idea that humiliation is a particularly intense and cognitively demanding negative emotional experience that has far-reaching consequences for individuals and groups alike,” they concluded.

This does not conclusively support the idea that Humiliation is our strongest emotion.  Further research should be conducted, but this does note that the brain seems to be doing more when a person feels humiliated, but we do not seem to know exactly what yet. One possibility, the researchers acknowledge, is that humiliation requires more mental processing, not because it’s so intense, but because it’s a complex social emotion that involves monitoring loss of social status.