My Thoughts on Humpty Dumpty, Science, and Humility

I have spent all my adult life working in three different worlds. For more than 40 years, I have been a scientist studying human behavior, particularly emotion, nonverbal behavior, and culture.

As a scientist, I have tried to discover things that are reliably true about people.

• What does the evidence tell us?
• What patterns can we identify?
• What theories best account for those patterns?

At the same time, I have spent even longer practicing, teaching, and coaching judo. Coaching asks a very different question than academia. I am not coaching athletes on average. I am coaching this one athlete.

• What makes this person tick?
• What helps this individual perform their best?
• How should I communicate with this particular person?

And during the last 20 years, I have increasingly worked in interviewing and other applied settings.

There again, the problem becomes intensely individual:

• How can I understand this one person better?
• How can I obtain better information from this single person sitting in front of me?

Living in these three worlds has led me to a realization that might initially sound strange:

The more I have learned about people, the humbler I have become about understanding a single person.

Inferential Humility Goes Deeper

In a recent paper and lecture, I introduced the idea of inferential humility, which suggests that behavior is evidence, not proof, that some behaviors contain meaningful signals, others contain noise; that evidence varies in diagnostic value; that alternative explanations remain possible; and that uncertainty cannot be eliminated.

The implication is straightforward: We should not claim more than the evidence justifies.

But I have continued thinking about inferential humility, and I now believe it goes deeper than that.

• It requires humility about our theories. What do our theories actually explain, and what might they leave unexplained?
• It requires humility about our expertise. Deep expertise in one domain does not necessarily translate into expertise about the whole person.
• It requires humility about our perspectives. The way I organize and interpret the world is my way of doing so; it may not be the way the person in front of me does.
• It requires humility about our process. How am I collecting information? How am I reasoning about it? What would cause me to revise my current understanding?
• And ultimately, it requires humility about the extraordinary complexity of the individual.

All of which raises a question I have been pondering: If we know so much about people, why is it still so difficult to understand the person in front of us?

The Problem Is Not Ignorance

Behavioral science knows an extraordinary amount about people.

We have enormous research literatures on emotion, cognition, personality, development, biology, neuroscience, nonverbal behavior, culture, communication, relationships, decision making, influence, interviewing, deception, negotiation, stress, risk, and countless other subjects.

During my career, I have watched scientific journals proliferate across increasingly specialized areas of inquiry. Scientists are producing more and more findings about increasingly specific aspects of human functioning.

Studies produce facts, and we have tons of facts. But facts are not necessarily the same as knowledge. And knowledge is not necessarily the same as wisdom.

I sometimes wonder whether our growth in knowledge—and especially wisdom about people—has kept pace with the enormous growth in facts, because knowing more things about people is not necessarily the same thing as knowing how to understand a person.

The Humpty Dumpty Problem

Science has produced what I think of as a Humpty Dumpty problem.

Science advances in large part by taking complicated phenomena apart. We isolate variables. We narrow questions. We develop increasingly sophisticated methods for studying increasingly specific things in artificial and controlled environments.

In other words, science naturally produces silos. Those silos are tremendously productive. We can develop deep knowledge about emotion, facial expression, physiology, cognition, personality, culture, or any number of other topics.

Universities institutionalize those silos. We have departments of psychology, biology, economics, sociology, anthropology, communication, neuroscience, medicine, business, and many others.

Even within a psychology department, everyone may be studying people, yet one researcher studies cognition, another emotion, another personality, another development, another culture, another social behavior, and another neuroscience.

Then come the specialties, subspecialties, and sub-subspecialties. Over the years, I have sometimes thought of myself and my colleagues as walking silos of information. And here is the problem: the structures that make specialization so productive do not automatically make integration easy (Figure below).

Scientific boundaries are extremely useful tools for studying people. But they are not necessarily boundaries inside people. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated about the pieces of people while remaining much less sophisticated about how those pieces work together in one person.

Eventually, somebody has to put Humpty Dumpty back together.

Specialization Is Not the Problem

I want to be clear about this. Specialization works. It is one of the great engines of scientific progress. And thank goodness for specialists.

If I have a complicated medical problem, I want someone who possesses deep expertise in precisely that problem. We do not need less specialization.

But specialization creates a paradox when we try to move from scientific knowledge to practice. The deeper we go into one piece, the easier it can become to see the person only through that one, single piece.

And the silos in which we work can also shape how we think. Academic debates frequently become organized around mutually exclusive alternatives: Is a phenomenon universal or culturally specific? Is biology or culture more important? Is the face or context more important? Is my theory right and yours wrong?

Constructive scientific debate is essential. Competing theories and disagreement can generate better research and better science. But sometimes I wonder whether we are asking the wrong kind of question.

Instead of simply asking, Who’s right?, perhaps we should also ask: Under what conditions might each be correct? How could two perspectives both contain something valid? How could each be partly right? How could both be incomplete—or even partly incorrect? And most importantly: Can we integrate apparently competing perspectives to produce something better and truer to what people are actually like?

I’ve Been Asking This Question Longer Than I Realized

Looking back over my own career, I realized that I have been wrestling with versions of this problem for a long time. When studies produced apparently conflicting conclusions about whether faces or contexts dominated judgments of emotion, I became interested in what kinds of contexts were being studied and under what conditions each mattered.

In debates about whether emotions and facial expressions were universal or culturally specific, I became interested in how biological and cultural influences could both contribute—and how their relative contributions might differ depending on what aspect of emotion we were trying to explain.

More recently, in studying nonverbal behavior and deception, I have become increasingly interested in moving beyond individual channels toward the larger communication package unfolding across channels and over time.

At times, I think specialization has allowed us—me included—to lose sight of the forest for the trees. That is often necessary when our scientific goal is to understand a particular tree. But practitioners eventually have to deal with the forest.

Practice Inherited the Pieces

The fragmentation does not end when scientific knowledge leaves the university. It follows that knowledge into practice. Professional training is often organized around specialized competencies: facial expressions, body language, emotional intelligence, culture, deception, interviewing, negotiation, personality, influence, communication, and many others.

Ours included. Humintell has participated in this structure too. I am not suggesting that everyone else has been doing something wrong while we somehow got it right. We have all inherited, to some extent, the pieces produced by science. And those pieces can be tremendously valuable. But eventually something happens.

And Then the Door Closes

Years ago, during a discussion about investigative interviewing, someone made a comment that has stayed with me: You can study all the theories. You can learn about facial behavior, voice, nonverbal behavior, language, personality, culture, interviewing techniques, and everything else. Then you and another person walk into the interview room. And then the door closes.

Now it is just the two of you. The science came into the room with you. But the science cannot substitute for the person sitting in front of you. You are no longer trying to understand people in general. You are trying to understand this person.

I have experienced the same thing in judo. I never coached the “average” athlete, the kind of generalized person our scientific findings necessarily describe. Principles of biomechanics mattered. Principles of physiology mattered. Principles of psychology mattered. Principles of training mattered.

But eventually I had to figure out what made this one athlete tick.

Understanding a person is therefore provisional. Scientific findings are an essential starting point, but they do not by themselves determine our understanding of an individual because real people don’t come in silos.

Real People Don’t Come in Silos

A person is simultaneously biological, cognitive, emotional, relational, historical, cultural, and contextual. They have a personality, goals, motives, relationships, a worldview, an organizational environment, immediate circumstances, and a personal history. They communicate verbally and nonverbally at the same time.

And culture is not simply another silo added to the list. People exist within multiple nested contexts. Culture operates through those contexts, shaping expectations, meanings, relationships, interpretations, and behavior. Context does not merely surround behavior. Context helps give behavior its meaning. The person is integrated even though the systems we use to study and teach about that person are specialized.

That leaves science and practice with two related but different intellectual problems.

• Specialization asks: How can we understand this piece more deeply?
• Integration asks: How does this piece operate with all the other relevant pieces when the whole system is functioning within an individual?

Both are necessary.

The Integration Problem Is a Reasoning Problem

Fragmentation can create predictable vulnerabilities. It can encourage single-cue thinking, technique dependence, channel isolation, context neglect, overgeneralization, and confirmation bias. And expertise in one piece does not necessarily translate into expertise in the whole person. Deep expertise should improve judgment. But it should not eliminate humility. High confidence is not necessarily high accuracy.

When we sit across from one individual, the questions change.

• What should I pay attention to?
• Which information is signal and which is noise?
• Which evidence deserves greater weight?
• What if different behavioral channels conflict?
• What does culture change?
• What does context change?
• What alternative explanations remain plausible?
• How confident should I be?
• And perhaps most importantly: What should make me revise my current understanding?

This last question is especially important because understanding a person should evolve as new information becomes available.

This leads me to a distinction that I think is critical: This is not just a knowledge problem. It is a reasoning problem.

We can possess excellent knowledge and still reason poorly with it. Knowing all the pieces is not the same as knowing how to think across the pieces—what matters, what relates, what conflicts, what deserves greater weight, what remains uncertain, and when our understanding should change. Better reasoning may help us put Humpty Dumpty back together again (Figure 2).

Four Forms of Inferential Humility

That brings me back to inferential humility. Four forms seem particularly important:

• Humility about evidence: What does the evidence actually support?
• Humility about knowledge: What might my theory or expertise be missing?
• Humility about the person: Does what is generally true actually apply to this individual?
• Humility about the process: What would make me revise my current understanding?

Humility is not ignorance. It doesn’t mean we know nothing. It means knowing the limits of what we know and regulating our conclusions accordingly. We can make judgments while remaining appropriately uncertain about them.

Inferential humility therefore requires recognizing not only the limits of our conclusions but also the limits of our own perspectives. No single theory, discipline, behavioral channel, or training method owns the whole person.

Evidence Still Has to Anchor Us

None of this means that anything can mean anything. Quite the opposite. Integration without evidence becomes intuition. Intuition can sometimes be useful. But if our goal is science-based practice, our judgments must remain anchored in the strongest available evidence. At the same time: Evidence without integration remains fragmented.

We need both. Humility means respecting what the evidence establishes—and what it does not.

Maybe We’ve Been Asking Only Half the Question

Practitioners naturally ask: What else should I learn? That’s a great question. We should continue learning. Science should continue producing better evidence, and professionals should continue developing expertise. But perhaps there is another question that deserves equal attention:

Perhaps we do not simply need another piece. Perhaps we need a disciplined way of reasoning across the pieces—one that respects scientific evidence, culture, context, individual variation, uncertainty, alternative explanations, and the possibility that our current understanding may need to change.

Humility Disciplines Expertise

Eventually, for many practitioners, the door closes, and there is just you and another human being. After more than 40 years of studying, coaching, interviewing, and trying to understand people, I have come to believe that one of the most important things I can bring into that room—along with everything I have learned—is humility.

Humility doesn’t diminish expertise. It disciplines expertise.

The more I have learned about people, the humbler I have become about understanding a person.

Science advances by taking people apart. Understanding people requires putting the pieces back together.

The challenge is not to abandon those pieces. It’s to understand what each piece tells us, what it does not tell us, and how the relevant pieces fit together when we are trying to understand the one individual in front of us.

So I am left with a question:

How do we bring scientifically grounded knowledge together—within culture and context, and without claiming more than the evidence allows—to better understand the individual in front of us?

And ultimately: What would an integrated approach capable of doing that actually require?

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From Group-Level Science to the Individual in Front of Us

Introduction

Something has been bugging me for decades.

I have spent most of my professional life trying to understand people scientifically. Along the way, behavioral science has given us an enormous amount of valuable knowledge about human behavior. We know a great deal about emotion, personality, culture, cognition, communication, nonverbal behavior, relationships, and many other aspects of human functioning.

But throughout my career, I have repeatedly encountered the same problem. What science tells us reliably about people in general is not necessarily sufficient for understanding the particular individual standing in front of us.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me, especially during the last couple of decades as more of my work has involved applying behavioral science to real people in real situations.

The more I have thought about the problem, the more I have come to believe that understanding people is fundamentally an inference problem.

We do not directly observe another person’s thoughts, intentions, motives, emotions, or beliefs. We do not directly observe trust, deception, confidence, fear, empathy, or intent. What we observe are behaviors and communications—words, facial movements, voice, actions, timing, decisions, interactions, and other forms of behavior.

From those observations, we evaluate what they might mean and construct provisional explanations from necessarily incomplete evidence.

And that is much harder than it sounds.

People—and Behavior—Are Extraordinarily Complex

Start with the individual. Human beings come into the world with what I think of as a universal psychological toolkit: capacities for emotion, personality, language, cognition, social interaction, and other psychological functions. But we do not all come into the world with exactly the same amounts or configurations of these capacities. Anyone who has spent time around infants knows that children differ from one another from very early in life.

Then development begins. From birth—and probably before birth—we interact with our environments. Those interactions produce experiences and histories that are unique to each individual. Our initial capacities interact with development, relationships, circumstances, opportunities, challenges, and countless other experiences throughout infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and beyond.

By the time we encounter another person, we are therefore encountering the product of an extraordinarily complex developmental history.

Behavior reflects that complexity. At any particular moment, a person’s behavior may be influenced simultaneously by biology, personality, development, goals, emotions, relationships, culture, organizational demands, the immediate situation, and personal history. No single factor adequately explains most human behavior.

Consider something I know a little about: the face. Facial behavior is produced by a complex neuromuscular system. The many muscles of the face can be activated in different combinations, at different intensities, with different degrees of symmetry, and across different temporal patterns. Those movements can signal emotion, but emotion signaling is only one thing the face does. Facial muscles are also involved in speech articulation, conversational regulation, cognitive signaling, physical activity, and many other functions.

So even within one behavioral channel—the face—we are dealing with an extraordinarily complex signal system. And then we try to figure out what it means.

A Problem That Bothered Me as a Researcher

I first encountered another side of this problem relatively early in my career. I went to graduate school in clinical psychology. Although I ultimately decided that becoming a practicing clinician was not the path I wanted to pursue, I remain extremely grateful for that training.

Clinical psychology taught me to think about the individual. A clinician is not treating an average. There is an individual sitting in front of you. Perhaps it is a couple or a family, but ultimately you are dealing with particular human beings.

At the same time, I was being trained as a researcher. And research generally operates differently. Most psychological research examines group-level effects. We compare groups, or we examine associations among variables. We collect observations from many individuals and use statistics to identify systematic patterns in those observations.

Much of my own early research involved cross-cultural comparisons. I might compare Americans and Japanese on emotional experience, display rules, judgments of emotion, or another psychological variable. We would collect data, conduct statistical analyses, find a significant difference, and write a paper explaining how the groups differed. There is nothing wrong with that. That is how science identifies reliable regularities.

But something about those analyses kept bothering me. Suppose we compare two groups and find a statistically significant difference between their averages. That difference may be highly reliable. But when we look at the distributions of the individual people within those groups, we usually see enormous variability and substantial overlap.

A commonly known statistic that tests differences between groups is Analysis of Variance, also known as ANOVA. ANOVA makes the issue I’m discussing here especially visible. It separates the variability in the data associated with differences between groups and the variability among individuals within those groups. As a young researcher, I was trained to focus on the significant group effect. That was the finding. That was what went into the title, the abstract, and the discussion section.

But I kept looking at everything else. And what I invariably found was that the differences among individuals within the groups were enormous (Figure 1).

We might conclude that Americans tend to be one way and Japanese tend to be another way, and that statement could accurately describe the average difference. But it certainly did not mean that every American was one way and every Japanese person was another. The distributions overlapped.

That distinction matters because a scientifically valid group difference can become almost stereotypic when we move too easily from an average group tendency to an assumption about a particular individual.

The same issue appears throughout behavioral science. Large-scale reviews of social-psychological research have shown that many scientifically reliable effects account for a relatively modest portion of the overall variability in human behavior. That does not make the effects unimportant. Far from it. Reliable scientific findings give us essential information.

But they leave a great deal unexplained. That realization led me to a principle that has stayed with me:

A reliable scientific effect can be real, replicable, useful, and important without being a complete explanation of the individual in front of us.

My clinical training kept reminding me of the person. My research training kept giving me findings about groups. The tension between those two levels of understanding never really went away.

No Person Lives in a Vacuum

There is another complication. No person is an island, and nobody lives in an abstract vacuum. Every individual exists within multiple nested contexts.

At any moment, a person occupies a particular physical setting. They may be interacting with another person with whom they have a particular relationship. That interaction may occur within an organization—a workplace, family, school, military unit, police department, or another institution. Those organizations exist within communities and societies, which themselves exist within larger social and historical contexts.

Culture operates throughout these nested systems. For that reason, I do not think culture should be treated as an add-on to understanding behavior. Culture shapes the contexts in which behavior occurs. It influences expectations, meanings, relationships, norms, and behavior itself. And importantly, culture also shapes the observer who is trying to interpret that behavior.

This means that the same observable behavior can have different meanings in different contexts. Take behavior out of context and we may change its meaning.

Understanding another person therefore requires more than observing what that person does. We also need to understand where the behavior is occurring, with whom, under what circumstances, within what relationship, and within what larger cultural and social systems.

We Don’t Observe What We Most Want to Know

This brings us back to the fundamental inference problem. What do we usually want to know when we say that we want to understand another person?

We want to know what the person is thinking. What they are feeling. Whether they trust us. Whether they are being deceptive. What they intend to do. What motivates them.

But none of those things is directly observable. What we actually observe are words, facial movements, voice, gestures, actions, timing, decisions, and interactions.

Some of those behaviors may provide meaningful information about underlying mental states. Others may not. Which creates another problem.

We Make Inferences from a Mess

A lot of human behavior is noise. Some behavior is meaningful signal. But separating meaningful signals from noise is difficult, and people often do not do it very well. Even worse, real human interaction does not conveniently present us with one behavior at a time.

We receive words, facial movements, vocal characteristics, gestures, posture, timing, actions, context, and interaction history simultaneously. Some may be meaningful. Some may not. Some may converge. Others may contradict one another.

It is a mess. That is my technical term for it. And yet we make inferences from this mess every day.

Sometimes we observe one behavior and immediately believe we know what it means. Someone looks away, crosses their arms, hesitates before answering, changes their voice, smiles, frowns, or makes some other movement—and we jump from that observation to a conclusion about what is occurring inside that person’s mind.

But behavior does not work that simply.

When a Good Theory Gets the Individual Wrong

Another experience early in my career reinforced this point for me. In the 1980s, I worked with a prominent scholar studying appraisal theories of emotion. Appraisal theories generally propose that when people encounter events, their minds evaluate those events in particular ways, and those evaluations contribute to the emotions they experience.

I agree with the general premise. Something has to occur psychologically that produces anger rather than fear, sadness rather than happiness, or one emotional response rather than another.

Researchers developed elegant models of these appraisal processes, and many of the predicted relationships were supported across studies and cultures.

At one point, one of the major researchers in this area developed a computer program that essentially attempted to reverse the process. The program would ask a person to think about an emotional experience without saying which emotion they had experienced. It would then ask questions corresponding to the appraisal dimensions identified in the research. Based on the person’s answers, the program would infer which emotion that person had experienced.

I watched people use it. And the program was often wrong. A person could answer the questions and have the program conclude, in effect, “You were experiencing this emotion,” only for the person to respond, “No. That wasn’t the emotion I was experiencing.”

That experience stayed with me.

Here was an elegant theoretical system supported by statistically significant, replicable, cross-cultural findings. Yet when we reversed the problem and asked the model to tell us what was happening inside one particular person, accuracy became much more difficult.

The lesson was essentially the same one I had encountered in my statistical work:

A theory can correctly describe an average pattern and still be wrong about the person sitting in front of you.

Not All Signals Are Equally Diagnostic

There is still another complication. Even after we successfully distinguish meaningful signals from noise, not all signals are equally informative. Some signals are weak and ambiguous. Others have stronger relationships with particular psychological states. Different observations therefore carry different evidentiary value.

That means professionals trying to understand another person need to distinguish weaker evidence from stronger evidence and recognize when additional information is required. This has become an important principle in my applied work:

A behavioral signal should be treated as an indicator or pointer—not as one-to-one proof of a mental state.

A signal may tell us that something is happening that deserves attention. It may suggest a hypothesis. It may tell us that we should ask another question, gather additional information, or look for evidence in another behavioral channel.

But an indicator is not proof. That distinction is crucial.

Multiple channels and sources of information may need to be integrated. Converging evidence can strengthen an interpretation. Diverging evidence can be equally important because it tells us that our current explanation may be incomplete or incorrect.

Understanding people therefore requires more than knowing cues. It requires knowing how to reason about evidence.

Every Inference Contains Uncertainty

Once we put all these pieces together, an important conclusion follows. Every inference about another person contains some degree of uncertainty.

People are complex. Behavior is multiply determined. Group-level findings do not completely determine individuals. People exist within multiple nested contexts. Mental states are not directly observable. Behavior contains signal and noise. And even meaningful signals vary in diagnostic value.

For any one behavior, multiple explanations may remain plausible. Good judgment therefore requires more than selecting the first explanation that comes to mind.

We should consider alternative hypotheses. We should test and retest our interpretations against converging, disconfirming, and newly emerging information. When possible, we should integrate other sources of evidence. We should calibrate our confidence to the strength of that evidence.

And perhaps most importantly, we should be willing to change our minds.

New information may strengthen our original interpretation. It may weaken it. It may require us to revise the interpretation substantially. Sometimes it may require us to discard it altogether. That is not a failure of understanding. That is how good understanding should work.

Inferential Humility

All of this has led me to a concept I have been thinking about recently: inferential humility. By inferential humility, I mean: the discipline of calibrating what we conclude about a particular individual to what the available evidence actually justifies.

Researchers need inferential humility. Perhaps we all need more inferential humility.

We should be careful about how broadly we generalize statistically reliable findings and about what those findings allow us to conclude about particular individuals.

But consumers and practitioners of behavioral science need inferential humility as well. When we observe a behavior, we should resist the temptation to believe immediately that we know what it means. Confidence in an interpretation should be proportionate to the quality and quantity of the evidence supporting it.

This does not mean refusing to make judgments. Professionals have to make judgments all the time. Interviewers, clinicians, investigators, managers, negotiators, sales professionals, physicians, educators, and countless others have to interpret people and sometimes act on those interpretations.

Inferential humility means making those judgments with appropriate discipline. It means remembering the difference between what I observed and what I think that observation means.

It means recognizing alternative explanations. It means knowing when I need more information. And it means being willing to update.

A Method, Not More Tricks

This brings me to the question that has increasingly occupied my thinking. Professionals can learn many useful techniques for understanding people. We can learn to read facial expressions. We can study voice. We can study body language. We can learn about personality, culture, interviewing, negotiation, deception, emotion, and many other aspects of human behavior.

All those areas can provide valuable knowledge. But perhaps the larger problem is not that we need more isolated techniques. Perhaps we need a disciplined way of thinking about how all of those pieces fit together. And that brings me to the question I increasingly believe we should be asking. Perhaps the most important question isn’t:

How good are we at reading people?

Perhaps the better question is:

Do we have a disciplined way of reasoning about people?

These questions have been weighing on my mind for much of my career—through clinical training, basic research, decades of cross-cultural work, and especially during the years in which I have tried to apply behavioral science to real individuals in real professional settings.

I don’t pretend that I have solved the problem. But I increasingly believe that understanding people better begins with recognizing just how difficult the task really is.

And, I admit, after finally getting all of that off my chest, I feel a little better.

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A smile might bring an enthusiastic tail wag, while a frustrated expression can be met with a noticeably different response. But how much information can dogs actually gather just by looking at our faces?

New research suggests the answer may be: quite a lot.

A new study published in iScience used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine what happens inside dogs’ brains as they view different human facial expressions.

The researchers found evidence that dogs not only respond differently to happy faces, but may also be capable of distinguishing between certain negative emotional expressions—including fear, anger and sadness.

Looking Inside the Canine Brain

Scientists have known for some time that dogs are remarkably sensitive to human social signals.

Previous research has shown that dogs can distinguish between happy and angry human faces, and Humintell has previously explored research showing that dogs examine the eyes when deciphering facial expressions.

The new research takes this a step further by looking directly at how the canine brain responds.

Researchers at the University of Vienna trained family dogs to remain awake and completely still inside an fMRI scanner while looking at photographs of unfamiliar human faces.

In one experiment, dogs viewed happy and neutral expressions. In another, they viewed faces displaying happiness, fear, anger and sadness.

The researchers then compared patterns of brain activity associated with the different expressions.

A Human Smile May Actually Be Rewarding to Your Dog

One of the clearest findings involved happiness.

When dogs looked at happy human faces, researchers observed increased activity in brain areas that included the caudate nucleus, a region associated with reward processing.

This same general reward system can become active when dogs anticipate something positive, such as food, or encounter cues associated with familiar people.

In other words, a human smile isn’t simply something a dog visually notices. The dog’s brain appears to process it in a way associated with reward.

As study lead author Raúl Hernández-Pérez explained, simply smiling at a dog can provoke a small response in the animal’s brain related to reward processing.

Can Dogs Tell the Difference Between Fear, Anger and Sadness?

Perhaps the most intriguing finding involved negative expressions.

Earlier research had already suggested that dogs can discriminate between broadly positive and negative human facial expressions. But could they make finer distinctions within negative emotions?

The new findings suggest that, at least in some cases, they can.

The researchers detected different patterns of brain activity when dogs viewed fearful faces compared with angry or sad faces.

Notably, however, the researchers did not find a clear neural distinction between anger and sadness.

This distinction is important. The study does not demonstrate that dogs understand human emotions in exactly the same conceptual way humans do. Rather, it provides evidence that the canine brain is sensitive to differences among at least some categories of human emotional facial expressions.

According to the researchers, this is the first evidence that dogs’ brains can differentiate between specific negative emotional expressions rather than simply sorting expressions into “positive” and “negative.”

Your Dog Doesn’t Need to Know the Person

Another interesting element of the research is that the dogs weren’t looking at their owners.

They were shown unfamiliar human faces.

That suggests the responses weren’t simply the result of a dog learning that a particular expression on its owner’s face predicts a walk, treat, scolding or belly rub.

The facial expression itself appears to carry meaningful information.

The researchers actually suspect dogs might show even greater sensitivity when looking at people they know well, although that remains to be tested.

Thousands of Years of Learning to Read Humans

Why are dogs so good at paying attention to us?

Domestication may be part of the answer.

Humans and dogs have lived alongside one another for thousands of years. During that time, the ability to detect and respond appropriately to human social signals would have been extraordinarily useful.

Interestingly, communication between humans and dogs appears to have evolved in both directions.

Humintell previously covered research suggesting that domestication changed dogs’ anatomy and behavior in ways that made them better communicators with humans. Their expressive eyebrows, for example, help produce the irresistible puppy-dog eyes.

We’ve also discussed research examining why dogs wag their tails so much more than wolves.  One hypothesis is that humans consciously or unconsciously selected dogs for communicative behaviors we found appealing during domestication.

Dogs may therefore have become particularly good at communicating with us—while simultaneously becoming particularly attentive to the signals we send them.

Humans Communicate Differently With Dogs, Too

The relationship gets even more interesting when we look at our own behavior.

As we previously discussed in research on the way humans “baby talk” to dogs, people often use a high-pitched, affectionate tone when speaking to dogs that resembles the way adults speak to babies.

Curiously, however, we don’t necessarily accompany that voice with the same exaggerated facial expressions we use with human infants.

That raises an interesting question in light of the new research: If dogs are paying close attention to our faces, how much information are we communicating to them without realizing it?

Potentially quite a bit.

Don’t Assume Your Dog “Feels” Your Emotion

There is an important caveat to the new findings.

Seeing that a dog’s brain differentiates between human emotional expressions doesn’t tell us exactly what the dog is experiencing internally.

A dog’s brain responding to a happy face does not necessarily mean the dog itself becomes “happy” in the same sense that we would use the word to describe a human emotional experience.

Similarly, recognizing differences between fearful and angry faces doesn’t necessarily mean dogs understand the abstract concepts of *fear* and *anger*.

The researchers also don’t yet know how much of this ability is innate and how much dogs learn through their extensive interactions with people.

Those are important questions for future research.

The Remarkable Nonverbal Relationship Between Humans and Dogs

What makes the findings especially fascinating is that the human-dog relationship exists largely without shared language.

Dogs watch our eyes, faces, bodies, gestures and movements. Humans, in turn, learn to interpret canine signals ranging from facial movements and posture to vocalizations and tail wagging.

Research highlighted previously by Humintell has even suggested that humans can recognize emotional information in dogs’ facial expressions.

The communication, in other words, goes both ways.

The new findings add another piece to that puzzle. Dogs aren’t simply reacting to obvious behaviors such as reaching for a leash or opening a bag of treats. Their brains appear capable of extracting surprisingly nuanced information from the human face itself.

So the next time you look down and find your dog staring intently back at you, remember:

You may be reading your dog’s face—but your dog may be reading yours, too.

Read the Research

The new study, Dog brain representations of human facial expressions: Encoding happiness and differentiating specific negative expressions, was published in iScience.

Additional coverage is available from Science News and Scientific American.

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A recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience caught my attention because it touches on a question that has fascinated me for more than four decades:

How can infants understand their mothers and caregivers long before they understand language?

This question has been with me since my undergraduate days at the University of Michigan. Like many important moments in life, my interest in this area emerged largely through circumstance and opportunity.

As a psychology student, I was invited to participate in the department’s honors program and challenged to design and conduct an original research study. When asked what interested me, I found myself returning to a simple observation: infants seem remarkably capable of understanding their mothers and caregivers despite not yet understanding words.

That question ultimately led me to conduct my first cross-cultural research project, examining preschoolers’ ability to recognize emotions from nonverbal vocal cues in the United States and Japan. It also led me to work with renowned psychologist Robert Zajonc at Michigan and, later, Paul Ekman in California. Looking back, that single question helped shape much of my career in the study of emotion and nonverbal communication.

Over the years, I have continued to follow research that sheds light on how emotional communication develops before language.

What We Know About Emotional Development Before Birth

Today, researchers have accumulated a substantial body of evidence showing that emotional and communicative systems begin developing remarkably early.

Studies using ultrasound and MRI technology have documented facial movements in fetuses beginning in the first trimester.

Around seven to nine weeks of gestation, simple facial movements such as mouth opening and eyebrow movements begin to appear.

By eleven to fourteen weeks, researchers can observe actions such as sucking, yawning, and grimacing. As gestation progresses, these movements become increasingly coordinated and complex.

Researchers have observed:

• Sucking and swallowing motions
• Mouth opening and closing
• Lip pursing
• Eye movements
• Grimace-like contractions
• Yawning
• Cry-like facial configurations
• Cheek and tongue movements

Of course, we must be careful when interpreting these movements. Many fetal facial actions may reflect neural and motor development rather than emotional experiences as we understand them in adults. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the biological foundations for emotional communication are developing well before birth.

What We Know About Infants After Birth

Research on infants provides additional evidence that emotional perception emerges early in life.

Numerous studies have shown that infants display increasingly differentiated emotional expressions during their first years. Other research indicates that infants as young as seven months old can distinguish between different emotional facial expressions, such as happiness and sadness.

Because infants cannot tell us what they perceive, researchers often rely on measures such as brain activity and attention patterns. These studies consistently demonstrate that infants are sensitive to emotional information long before they acquire language.

A New Study on Maternal Voice Recognition

Against this backdrop, I was particularly interested in a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in December 2025 titled “The Neurotracking of the Maternal Voice in the Infant Brain“.

The study investigated whether infants track their mother’s voice differently from the voice of a stranger.

Twenty-five infants participated in the research. Before testing, each infant’s mother recorded herself reading a story. During the experiment, infants listened either to their own mother’s narration or to the narration of another mother while researchers recorded their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG).

The findings were striking.

The infants’ brains showed clear evidence of tracking both familiar and unfamiliar voices. However, neural tracking was consistently stronger when infants listened to their own mother’s voice.

Importantly, this effect remained even though the acoustic properties of the stories were comparable. In other words, the infants were not simply responding to differences in sound patterns; they appeared to be responding specifically to the familiarity of their mother’s voice.

Building a Mountain of Evidence

This study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that infants come into the world already attuned to their mothers and other close caregivers.

My interpretation of this research is that we are slowly building a mountain of evidence that begins before birth and continues through infancy.

From fetal facial movements to infant emotion recognition to neural responses to maternal voices, the findings increasingly point toward the same conclusion: human beings appear biologically prepared to connect with the people who care for them.

The mechanisms underlying that connection are still being explored, and many questions remain unanswered. But studies like this bring us closer to understanding how infants can recognize, respond to, and learn from their caregivers long before they understand language.

More than forty years after I first became interested in this question, it is exciting to see science continuing to provide new pieces of the puzzle.

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Recent research is revealing that facial expressions are not simply emotional outputs. Instead, they are socially meaningful behaviors generated by complex brain networks designed to help us communicate, influence, and connect with others.

The Brain Doesn’t Just Read Faces—It Creates Social Signals

Scientists have long understood that the human brain contains specialized systems dedicated to recognizing faces. New research from Rockefeller University has shifted attention to an equally important question: How does the brain create facial expressions?

Researchers identified a network of interconnected brain regions that work together to generate facial movements. Surprisingly, these regions do not appear to divide neatly into “emotional” versus “voluntary” expressions, as many researchers previously believed. Instead, multiple areas contribute to a wide variety of facial behaviors, operating at different timescales and serving different functions.

In other words, producing a smile is not as simple as pressing an emotional button. The brain coordinates a sophisticated hierarchy of neural processes that transform intentions, social context, and emotional states into visible facial behavior.

The findings suggest that many facial expressions are best understood as purposeful communication signals rather than purely automatic emotional leaks.

Why This Matters for Behavioral Intelligence

For professionals who rely on interpersonal communication—investigators, interviewers, negotiators, leaders, sales professionals, and human resource practitioners—this distinction is important.

A common misconception is that every facial expression provides a direct readout of someone’s internal emotional state. The reality is more nuanced.

People use facial expressions to:

• Encourage cooperation
• Signal affiliation
• Manage impressions
• Seek support
• Influence outcomes
• Regulate social interactions

A smile, for example, may communicate genuine enjoyment. It may also communicate politeness, reassurance, agreement, confidence, or a desire to strengthen rapport. The behavioral meaning depends heavily on context.

This perspective aligns with decades of research showing that nonverbal behavior functions as part of a broader communication system rather than serving as a simple truth detector.

Expressions Are About Relationships, Not Just Feelings

One of the most significant implications of this research is that facial expressions appear fundamentally social.

The brain begins preparing facial gestures before the face even moves. Rather than merely reflecting what a person feels, facial expressions help shape what happens next in an interaction.

This supports a growing body of evidence suggesting that expressions function as social tools. Humans do not simply display emotions; they communicate intentions, coordinate relationships, and influence others through visible behavior.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Our ancestors depended on rapid social communication for cooperation, survival, and group cohesion. Facial expressions became an efficient way to transmit information before a single word was spoken.

What This Means for Reading People

The takeaway is not that facial expressions are meaningless. Quite the opposite.

Facial behavior provides valuable information. However, effective observers avoid the trap of assigning one-to-one emotional labels to every expression they see.

Instead of asking:

“What emotion does this expression reveal?”

A better question is:

“What is this behavior communicating in this moment?”

This shift moves us from simplistic emotion guessing to a more accurate behavioral analysis approach—one that considers context, timing, baseline behavior, verbal communication, and the broader social environment.

This idea is supported by a landmark review published in Science, which argues that facial expressions should not always be viewed as universal readouts of emotion. Instead, expressions are influenced by social context, culture, goals, and interpersonal dynamics. The same facial movement may communicate different meanings depending on the situation, the relationship between individuals, and the broader environment.

Taken together, the neuroscience and behavioral research point to the same conclusion: understanding facial expressions requires understanding context.

Facial Expressions, Emotion, and Context

Importantly, these findings should not be interpreted as evidence that facial expressions of emotion do not exist.

Research has demonstrated that certain emotional expressions can be recognized across cultures, suggesting an important biological component to human emotional communication.

Rather, the emerging science highlights that facial behavior serves many functions beyond emotional expression. While facial expressions of emotion may have universal elements, people also use their faces to communicate intentions, manage impressions, regulate social interactions, and influence outcomes.

The challenge is not choosing between biology and context—it is understanding how both work together to shape human behavior.

This distinction is particularly important for professionals who rely on behavioral observation. A facial expression may provide valuable clues about a person’s emotional state, but effective interpretation requires considering context, verbal communication, baseline behavior, and other nonverbal signals. Understanding human behavior is rarely about finding a single “tell.” It is about evaluating multiple sources of information to arrive at the most accurate assessment possible.

Viewed through this lens, the latest neuroscience and behavioral research are not contradictory. Both suggest that facial expressions are meaningful—but that their meaning is best understood within the broader context of human interaction.

Turning Science into Practical Skills

Understanding that facial expressions are social signals rather than simple emotional readouts has important implications for anyone whose success depends on accurately interpreting human behavior.

Whether you’re conducting interviews, leading teams, negotiating agreements, selling products, building rapport, or assessing credibility, the goal is not simply to identify a single emotion from a facial expression. Instead, effective behavioral analysis requires understanding how facial expressions interact with context, language, body language, and the dynamics of the interaction.

This is precisely the approach taught in Humintell’s online training programs.

Humintell’s courses are designed to help professionals move beyond myths and misconceptions about body language and develop evidence-based observation skills grounded in behavioral science. Students learn how to identify meaningful behavioral patterns, evaluate context, recognize emotional expressions, and avoid common interpretation errors that can lead to inaccurate conclusions.

Rather than teaching people to rely on isolated cues, Humintell emphasizes a comprehensive approach to behavioral intelligence—one that integrates facial expressions, body language, verbal behavior, and situational context.

The latest neuroscience reinforces an important lesson: human behavior is complex. The most effective communicators and observers are those who understand not only what people are expressing, but why those expressions may be occurring in a particular situation.

For professionals seeking to improve their ability to understand others, communicate more effectively, and make better-informed decisions, continued education in behavioral intelligence can provide a significant advantage.

Learn to Apply Behavioral Science in the Real World

As researchers continue uncovering how the brain produces and interprets facial behavior, our understanding of communication will continue to evolve.

What remains constant is the importance of context. Facial expressions provide valuable information, but they are only one piece of a much larger behavioral puzzle.

The most accurate behavioral assessments come not from decoding a single expression, but from understanding how verbal and nonverbal behaviors work together within a specific social context.

Humintell’s online courses help professionals develop the skills needed to interpret behavior more accurately, communicate more effectively, and make better decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions.

If you’re interested in applying the science of human behavior to your profession, explore Humintell’s online training programs and discover how behavioral intelligence can enhance your ability to understand and influence human interaction.

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What if everything you thought you knew about emotions was only half the story?

In this opening episode of the Nonverbal ACEs Masters Series, Dr. David Matsumoto — one of the world’s foremost authorities on emotion science, cross-cultural psychology, and the universality of facial expressions — challenges practitioners to go deeper than conventional training ever goes.

Drawing on decades of research spanning evolutionary biology, FACS methodology, and cross-cultural studies, Dr. Matsumoto unpacks:

• Why facial expressions are biological tools, not cultural inventions — and what that means for how you read clients
• The “open system” model of emotion: how triggers are learned, but responses are hardwired
• Display Rules vs. Instrumental Behaviour — the two distinct layers of cultural influence that mask what clients truly feel
• Why “Universalist” vs. “Constructivist” is a false debate — and what actually bridges them in clinical practice
• What micro-expressions and subtle expressions reveal that macro-behaviour conceals

Whether you’re a therapist, psychologist, or coach, this episode reframes emotion not as a psychological concept — but as a biological system you can learn to read with precision.

FREE ACCESS: Watch all five episodes in the Nonverbal ACEs Masters Series: nonverbalaces.com/nvmaster-series

ABOUT DR. DAVID MATSUMOTO

Dr. David Matsumoto is a Professor of Psychology at San Francisco State University, Director of Humintell, and one of the world’s leading researchers in emotion, nonverbal behaviour, and cross-cultural psychology. His work is used by intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and clinical practitioners globally.

ABOUT THE NONVERBAL ACES MASTERS SERIES

The Masters Series brings together five world-leading experts in nonverbal behaviour, emotion science, trauma, values, and influence — giving mental health and coaching professionals the science-backed skills to read behaviour at a deeper level and transform client outcomes.

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But new research entitled “Emotions on our Screens” suggests something surprising: emotional expression may actually reduce persuasive impact, even when audiences agree with the message.

This insight has profound implications—not just for digital communication, but for how we understand nonverbal behavior, facial expressions of emotion, and credibility in human interaction.

Emotional Expression vs. Persuasion: A Disconnect

The study found that when people encounter emotional content online—especially expressions of sadness or distress—they often respond with skepticism rather than empathy.

Participants across multiple experiments:

• Rated emotional posts as less authentic
• Viewed emotional expressions as less appropriate
• Were more likely to interpret emotional displays as manipulative

Even more striking: this reaction held regardless of political agreement. In other words, even when people agreed with the message, the emotional delivery reduced trust in the communicator.

This creates a paradox:

Emotion increases visibility and engagement—but decreases credibility and persuasion.

The Role of Nonverbal Behavior in Digital Contexts

From a Humintell perspective, this research aligns closely with what we know about nonverbal communication.

In face-to-face interaction, nonverbal cues—tone, posture, gestures, and especially facial expressions of emotion—provide critical context that helps others interpret sincerity.

The shift to digital communication has undoubtedly changed the way we read people.

Dr. Matsumoto suggests that this largely stems from the fact that humans did not evolve to do 2-dimensional communication, such as through a computer screen. On the contrary, we have evolved our perceptual senses to live in a 3-dimensional world and our sense of reality is grounded in that fact.

Interactions are based on being live and in person. Being live and in person with somebody and interacting with them is what we’ve evolved to do and what we’ve learned to do all of our lives.

But online, those cues are:

• Reduced (text-only posts)
• Exaggerated (dramatic videos, crying selfies)
• Or ambiguous (filtered, curated expressions)

Without full nonverbal context, audiences rely on rapid judgments:

• “Is this genuine?”
• “Is this performative?”
• “Is this trying to influence me?”

When emotional signals feel misaligned or overly intense, they trigger what we might call a nonverbal credibility gap.

Facial Expressions of Emotion: When Signals Backfire

One of the most compelling findings: posts featuring a visible sad facial expression (e.g., crying) were seen as especially inappropriate and less credible.

This is fascinating from a behavioral science standpoint.

Facial expressions are typically:

• Automatic signals of internal emotional states
• Interpreted as honest indicators of feeling

However, in digital environments:

• Expressions can be staged or repeated
• Viewers assume intentional signaling rather than spontaneous emotion

This shifts perception from:

• “They feel this” → to → “They want me to feel something”

That shift is critical. It transforms emotion from a signal of authenticity into a signal of persuasion attempt.

Why Emotion Triggers Skepticism

This phenomenon connects to a well-known concept in persuasion science: the Elaboration Likelihood Model.

When people detect persuasion attempts—especially emotional ones—they often:

• Shift into more critical, analytical processing
• Question the motives behind the message
• Resist being influenced

Additionally, excessive emotional appeals can resemble what’s known as an “appeal to emotion”, where feelings are used to sway judgment rather than evidence.

In modern digital environments, audiences are highly attuned to this.

The result:

• Emotional intensity → signals persuasion intent
• Perceived persuasion intent → triggers skepticism
• Skepticism → reduces influence

Emotion Still Matters—Just Not How You Think

Importantly, the research does not suggest that emotion is useless.

In fact, emotional expression:

• Helps people build community
• Reinforces shared identity
• Provides psychological relief (catharsis)

So emotion is highly effective for:

• Connection
• Belonging
• Engagement

But less effective for:

• Changing minds
• Increasing credibility
• Persuading skeptics

Practical Implications for Communicators

If your goal is persuasion rather than expression:

• Use emotion sparingly and strategically
• Avoid exaggerated or performative facial expressions
• Pair emotional content with clear, evidence-based messaging
• Focus on credibility cues (consistency, calm delivery, clarity)

If your goal is connection:

• Emotional expression can be powerful—but expect resonance, not persuasion

Final Thought

In a digital world saturated with emotional content, audiences are becoming more sophisticated interpreters of nonverbal behavior and emotional signaling.

The irony is clear:

The more we try to persuade through emotion, the more people question our sincerity.

Understanding how facial expressions of emotion, nonverbal cues, and perceived intent interact is no longer optional—it’s essential for anyone hoping to communicate effectively in the modern age.

Ready to Influence More Effectively?

Emotional expression alone won’t persuade—and as this research shows, it can even undermine credibility.

If you want to learn how to use emotion strategically, read nonverbal behavior, and interpret facial expressions of emotion to increase trust and influence, Humintell’s Introduction to Tactical Social Influence webinar delivers practical, science-based tools you can apply immediately.

Stop guessing. Start influencing with precision.

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What Primates Can Teach Us About Human Emotion

What if the roots of human emotional intelligence extend far beyond human interaction?

A recent study highlighted by ZME Science reveals something fascinating: humans don’t just recognize emotional expressions in non-human primates—we mirror them. And we do it automatically.

This finding reinforces something we emphasize at Humintell: nonverbal behavior, especially facial expressions of emotion, is deeply embedded in our biology.

The Universality of Facial Expressions

Researchers found that when people watched monkeys and apes expressing emotions like playfulness or threat, they could accurately interpret those emotions—and even more interestingly, they spontaneously mimicked them.

This suggests that facial expressions are not just culturally learned behaviors. They are part of an evolved communication system shared across species.

At Humintell, we focus on how facial expressions function as one of the most reliable and universal forms of nonverbal communication. This research strengthens that foundation—showing that even across species, emotional signals are recognizable and contagious.

Why Mimicry Matters for Emotional Intelligence

This automatic mirroring is known as emotional mimicry, and it plays a critical role in empathy.

When you subtly mirror someone’s facial expression, your brain begins to simulate their emotional state. This process helps you understand what they’re feeling—often before they say a word.

The study also found that mimicry increases when there is a sense of connection or positivity. In other words:

• We mirror people we like more
• We mirror positive emotions more strongly
• This strengthens rapport and trust

These patterns are just as relevant in human interaction as they are in cross-species communication.

Nonverbal Behavior Happens Automatically

One of the most important takeaways is that this process is unconscious.

Participants weren’t told to mimic anything—their faces responded in real time. This highlights a key truth: nonverbal behavior operates faster than conscious thought.

That’s why it plays such a powerful role in:

• leadership
• negotiations
• interviews
• security and threat detection

Facial expressions—especially brief, involuntary ones—can reveal emotional states before someone is even aware of them.

The Role of Microexpressions

This is where microexpressions come into play.

Microexpressions are rapid, involuntary facial expressions that reveal genuine emotion. They are part of the same automatic system that drives mimicry.

If we are wired to produce these expressions without thinking, it means they can also be detected—if you know what to look for.

Developing this skill allows professionals to:

• identify concealed emotions
• improve communication accuracy
• build trust more effectively

Strengthen Your Emotional Recognition Skills

If emotional understanding is largely automatic—but often unnoticed—then improving your awareness can give you a powerful edge.

At Humintell, our Emotion Recognition Training is designed to help you accurately detect facial expressions, including subtle and fleeting microexpressions.

You’ll learn how to:

• read emotions in real time
• interpret nonverbal behavior more accurately
• make better decisions in high-stakes interactions

Whether you work in leadership, sales, security, or healthcare, mastering these skills can significantly improve your effectiveness.

Ready to elevate your emotional intelligence?
Explore Humintell’s Emotion Recognition Training and start seeing what others miss.

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Understanding emotion, emotional triggers, and nonverbal behavior requires moving beyond surface reactions to examine why certain situations elicit specific responses.

You may have heard of Alex Honnold- a famous rock climber who gained worldwide notoriety after becoming the first person to free solo El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.

Most recently, Honnold climbed Taipei 101, a 1667 foot skyscraper, while it was streamed live on Netflix.

The story of Honnold — whose amygdala shows unusually low activation in response to fear-inducing images — provides a compelling case study in how the brain’s evaluation of events shapes emotional experience.

For professionals who study emotion, facial expressions, and nonverbal behavior, this research helps clarify a foundational truth:

Emotions are not triggered by events themselves, but by how the brain appraises those events.

Emotion Triggers: Appraisal and Psychological Themes

Emotion scientists generally agree that emotions are triggered through appraisal — a rapid cognitive evaluation of a stimulus that determines its emotional significance.

In Humintell’s work on what triggers emotions, this appraisal process is framed around universal psychological themes linked to basic emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, contempt, and surprise.

Examples of these themes include:

Fear — triggered when something is appraised as threatening to physical or psychological integrity.

Happiness — elicited when an event is appraised as goal attainment.

Sadness — triggered by loss.

This perspective reframes emotion triggers not as simple reflexes, but as meaning-making processes that rapidly evaluate events (external situations, internal thoughts, or memories) in terms of their relevance to wellbeing or survival.

Honnold’s Brain: A Case of Appraisal Differences

The fMRI study of Alex Honnold’s brain found unusually low activation in his amygdala — a key region in threat detection and the generation of fear emotions — when he viewed fear-provoking imagery.

What this doesn’t mean is that Honnold cannot feel fear. Rather:

• His brain appears to appraise situations typically interpreted as threatening in a different way than most people.
• His emotional evaluation system may place less psychological threat value on those stimuli — likely because of how his experiences have shaped his appraisal patterns.

From an emotional trigger standpoint, Honnold provides a vivid example of how what counts as a threat — and what counts as safe — is defined by learned patterns of appraisal, not raw sensory input.

The Role of Experience in Emotional Interpretation

Appraisal theories of emotion emphasize that meaning is everything. The same event — a steep drop on a rock face, for example — may be appraised as threatening by one person and manageable by another based on:

• learned competence
• familiarity and mastery
• expectations of outcome
• somatic and cognitive associations

Honnold’s brain likely reflects repeated exposure and habituation, where what would trigger a strong fear response in most people no longer activates the same appraisal processes in him. This is consistent with how repeated experiences reshape emotional triggers over time.

For professionals who teach or assess emotional intelligence:

• Emotional triggers shift with experience.
• Appraisal centrality explains why individuals with expertise in a domain often show reduced fear-related facial expressions yet remain emotionally engaged.

Facial Expressions and Emotional Triggers

From a nonverbal behavior perspective, understanding triggers matters because the face does not just reflect emotion — it reflects appraisal outcomes.

A person’s appraisal of a stimulus influences:

• the intensity of the emotional response
• the presence or absence of facial indicators such as eye widening, brow movements, or tension in the mouth
• the timing and subtlety of microexpressions

This means that someone like Honnold may exhibit:

• subdued fear-related facial expressions
• more consistent facial control under pressure
• fewer nonverbal cues typically associated with threat appraisal

For analysts, this highlights a critical analytic point: absence of fear expressions does not equal absence of internal experience. It may reflect a different appraisal threshold or pattern.

Beyond the Amygdala: Regulation and Interpretation

While the amygdala is central to detecting potential threat, it does not act alone in shaping emotion. The prefrontal cortex contributes to emotional regulation by modifying the interpretation and behavioral expression of emotions — a key element of emotional intelligence.

In professional contexts:

• Emotional regulation influences how triggers manifest in the face and body.
• Skilled communicators can manage automatic appraisals, attenuating or amplifying emotional expression appropriately.

This interplay between appraisal, emotional triggers, and nonverbal expression underscores why emotion expertise must consider both internal evaluation processes and observable signals.

What This Means for Reading Emotions

The case of Honnold’s brain reinforces that emotional triggers are not uniform across individuals:

• A threat for one person may not be a threat for another.
• The same stimulus can produce divergent emotional and nonverbal responses based on history, appraisal, and cognition.
• Universal psychological themes guide basic emotion triggers, but personal experiences shape how and when these themes are activated.

For anyone practicing advanced emotion recognition, this means you must:

• Assess baseline appraisal patterns for individuals
• Understand that nonverbal expression reflects meaning-making, not just sensation
• Recognize that emotional triggers are dynamic, not fixed

Emotion as Adaptive Meaning-Making

Ultimately, emotion — including fear — is a dynamic system that results from how the brain evaluates and interprets what matters to the individual.

Honnold’s brain reminds us that emotion triggers are not simple reflexes but sophisticated appraisal mechanisms shaped by experience and context.

When we understand the role of appraisal and universal psychological themes in emotional triggers, we gain deeper insight into both why emotions arise and how they are expressed nonverbally — core knowledge for anyone committed to mastering emotional intelligence and behavior reading.

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A new study, published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, offers compelling evidence that elevated blood pressure may actually mute our ability to express certain emotions on the face.

This work extends a growing line of research on Cardiovascular Emotional Dampening (CED). Previous studies have shown that individuals with higher blood pressure often struggle to recognize emotions in others.

But recognition is only half of the communication process. The other half—how well we express our own emotions—has received far less attention. Until now.

A First Look at Expression, Not Just Perception

To explore this expressive side of CED, researchers recruited adults across a range of blood pressure levels: normotensive, prehypertensive, and hypertensive.

Participants were asked to deliberately pose six basic emotions—happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise—while being recorded.

What makes this study especially robust is that the researchers didn’t rely on just one method of evaluation.

Each expression was coded by both trained human raters and an automated facial-analysis system. This dual-approach allowed the team to capture subtle details in facial movement and emotional accuracy.

The results were striking.

High Blood Pressure, Lower Expressive Accuracy

Individuals with higher blood pressure consistently showed reduced accuracy when attempting to portray several negative emotions. Expressions of sadness, fear, and surprise were particularly affected. Their facial movements were often less pronounced, less coordinated, or did not match the emotion they were instructed to express.

Even more interesting, these expressive deficits were correlated with both systolic and diastolic blood pressure levels. In other words, as blood pressure climbed, expressive clarity tended to drop.

But one emotion stood out as the exception: happiness. Smiles, it seems, remained largely intact across blood-pressure groups. Positive facial expressions did not show the same dampening effect.

This asymmetry—preserved positive expressivity alongside muted negative expressivity—matches patterns seen in previous research on perception. People with higher blood pressure tend to have more difficulty recognizing negative emotions too. This new work suggests that the expressive channel may be shaped in a similar way.

Why Blood Pressure Would Affect the Face

At first glance, the idea that blood pressure could influence facial expressions sounds surprising. But the connection makes sense when viewed through the lens of embodiment and autonomic regulation.

Our emotional expressions depend on rapid, flexible coordination between the brain, autonomic nervous system, and facial musculature.

Elevated blood pressure is associated with reduced autonomic flexibility, altered baroreflex functioning, and changes in brain regions tied to emotion.

Together, these physiological shifts may blunt the body’s responsiveness—making expressions less intense or less accurately matched to the intended emotion.

In other words, emotional dampening may reflect a broader bodily pattern, rather than a conscious choice.

Implications for Emotional Communication

For those of us who study or teach nonverbal behavior, these findings highlight an important nuance.

When people express emotions weakly or unclearly, the first impulse may be to attribute meaning: Are they bored? Detached? Concealing something?

But this study suggests a different possibility—some individuals may be genuinely physiologically less expressive in certain emotional domains.

This is especially relevant in high-stakes interpersonal environments:

• clinical interviews

• security screenings

• conflict-resolution settings

• relationship communication

• or any context requiring accurate emotional interpretation.

A muted expression of fear or sadness may reflect cardiovascular state, not emotional withholding.

This does not mean that facial expressions are unreliable. Rather, it underscores the role of individual differences—and why accurate emotion reading requires context, pattern recognition, and caution against over-interpretation.

Where the Research Is Heading

This study opens several important doors for future inquiry.

One question is whether these expressive differences appear in spontaneous emotional behavior, not just posed expressions. Real-world emotional reactions often rely on automatic facial-muscle activation, which may be even more susceptible to physiological influences.

Another question concerns other nonverbal channels. Prior research has shown that emotional dampening linked to elevated blood pressure can affect recognition of vocal and cross-modal cues as well. Whether expressive dampening extends to the voice, gestures, or posture remains to be seen.

Finally, researchers are beginning to wonder whether improving cardiovascular health—through stress reduction, exercise, or medical treatment—might help restore emotional clarity in recognition and expression. If so, the relationship between physiology and emotion may be more dynamic than previously thought.

The Takeaway

This new study adds an important piece to the puzzle of how our bodies shape our emotional world. Elevated blood pressure doesn’t only influence the heart and blood vessels—it may subtly influence the face we show to others.

For clinicians, trainers, and anyone committed to understanding nonverbal behavior, the message is clear: emotional expression is deeply embodied. And sometimes, behind a quiet or muted face, the physiology may be speaking louder than the expression itself.

Commentary from Dr. Matsumoto

There’s much to like about this study. Before I comment about the implications of its findings, however, I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss some questions about the methodology that I have.

First, I’m wondering how they measured accuracy of emotional expressions. Expression accuracy can be measured several different ways and the authors never explained that in detail. That type of detail is important in understanding how to interpret the findings, so I would have wanted more info about that.

Also, the study didn’t require participants to engage in an emotion recognition or perception task. That would have been important because the authors make interpretations about the associations between expressions and perceptions in the Discussion, along with their underlying neural processes. Without actual data about that, however, such interpretations rest on many assumptions and thus become quite speculative.

But let’s give on the methods issues for a moment and consider the implications of the findings, which are interesting and have strong implications for an understanding of the effects of high blood pressure on the neural pathways controlling facial expressions.

More generally, the findings raise questions about how other psychophysiological states impact expression and recognition, and why. Do these findings generalize to stress, neuropathies, or other medical conditions? And what do such effects mean about how humans are wired together, a question that we have so much left to explore.

All in all the study is quite thought provoking and should inspire more research like it in the future, integrating emotion, health, and neuropsychological topics.

Given the dismantling of Humpty Dumpty into many silos of academia for the past century, hopefully the future can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

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