Social Engineering Blogs

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The Challenges of Cross Cultural Communication

You may be great about reading some people, but there are still a lot of people whose distinct outlook and culture may elude you.

One of the most important parts of learning how to read people is accepting that this process varies considerably across different cultures, despite the presence of universal basic emotions. In a recent study, Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang seek to investigate the main methodological barriers that confront those of us who want to learn to accurately read the facial expressions of those outside our own culture.

Hopefully, by better understanding these challenges future research can be effectively guided to help all of us fine tune our emotional recognition skills. But how do you as a follower of this blog gain anything from this? Try keeping these points in mind as you read future articles or peruse previous blogs and see if any of these hold for the research that we have reported. Not only will this make all of us a better scholar, but it will enrich your own abilities to read people.

The first of these methodological critiques is the way in which actual experiments are conducted. While Matsumoto and Hwang applaud the efforts of researchers to point out similarities and differences between those of various cultures, they caution us against jumping to any conclusions about the source of any differences.

Many differences, they point out, are just the result of the specific group selected and need not be reflective of an entire culture. This may be especially true in culturally diverse nations or regions where people who live just down the street approach the world from different cultural or social backgrounds.

Their second point is similar in focusing on the potentially biased nature of sampling, i.e. who is brought into the study. Often these experiments are conducted on international students at a university, where they are taken as representative of their home culture. Certainly, this can be seen as flawed as these participants may not be reflective of that culture, either due to a similar flaw as in the last critique or because of their more specific nature as an international student.

In a third argument, Matsumoto and Hwang make a point relevant to all aspects of emotional recognition, namely that many facial expressions also closely resemble other purposeful nonverbal behavior. For instance, raised eyebrows may be a sign of surprise, or it may be a gesture indicating greeting. This problem is even more relevant to cross cultural communication where gestures vary drastically between groups and may not be known to the researcher.

Finally, they question the traditionally bounded nature of many of the questions asked. We may want to test what factors lead to successful emotional recognition, but what exactly does recognition consist of? In doing research, this has to get simplified in order to test it, but especially with complex cross cultural considerations, this simplification may obscure the very real complexities.

This last point is especially salient when conducting advanced statistical analyses. While these are certainly useful, Matsumoto and Hwang also caution that it may be best to ask participants more open-ended questions.

Many of these points reflect broader methodological problems in other fields of social science, and they are not easy to wrestle with. However, they are important to keep in mind both for researchers and people like yourself that are just trying to learn about these fascinating topics.

We definitely recommend that you use these to review other research an, in the meantime, check out some of our official resources on cross-cultural communication! Maybe you’ll develop your own method-based critiques.

The Length of a Microexpression

What exactly are microexpressions?

While we certainly know how important microexpressions are in reading other people, there are still a great deal of outstanding questions. One of these concerns the very nature of a microexpression: how long do they last? This is an important question in better understanding to what extent they are categorically different from normal expressions.

This was exactly what Dr. Xunbing Shen and his team sought to determine in a 2016 study. They suspected that the process of recognizing a short (less than 200 milliseconds) and a long (greater than 200 milliseconds) expression were distinctive neurological processes. Therefore, they hypothesized that this distinction was also what could distinguish microexpressions from normal, macroexpressions.

Importantly, the researchers employed an “affective priming paradigm,” which utilized a picture of a facial expression to prime an associated emotional word. This attempts to elicit distinctive brain responses when there is a mismatch between word and expression, in this case seeking to hold a microscope up to differing reactions to micro and macroexpressions.

In order to answer their hypothesis, Dr. Shen’s team compiled a small team of volunteers. These participants were shown a series of images showcasing 30 different expressions, displaying either fear, happiness, or a neutral expression, alongside a related series of 100 emotionally significant words.

The series of faces were paired with words, some of which matching the emotion expressed and some of which not. Moreover, the exposure to faces was varied from 40 to 300 milliseconds, in order to test the impact of fleeting microexpressions. During this process, brain scans recorded activity that occurred as participants attempted to identify the emotions expressed.

After completing the experiment, Dr. Shen and his team compared brain activity during both long and short duration expressions. They found significant differences, with the brain’s left hemisphere more active while perceiving microexpressions, for example.

While these results may seem strange, given that expressions are the same regardless of the duration. The study concludes by offering some possible explanations. Essentially, it takes more attention to perceive a shorter expression. This may be because mimicry is crucial to detecting expressions, and this is hard to do quickly. Instead, participants were forced to tap into their memory in hopes of identifying the expression that way.

There are certainly still some unanswered questions, but this work helps further distinguish the process of expression recognition. It is not just a matter of recognizing fleeting variants of normal expressions, as microexpression recognition is a wholly distinctive neurological process.

Naturally, Humintell is pretty excited at the multitude of directions that exist to study microexpressions. If you share this enthusiasm, check out some more information or consider enrolling in a relevant training class!

Revisiting Nonverbal Behavior

We have shown that nonverbal behavior is crucial to detecting deception, but it seems that our previous discussions have been a little insufficient.

Certainly this has been a major discussion in this blog, but we have focused only on individual behaviors, like eye contact or gestures, in order to explain how important nonverbal behavior is. However, as new research by Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyisung Hwang demonstrates, clusters of multiple behaviors may be even more important.

In their forthcoming study, Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang build on previous research suggesting that focusing on a given individual nonverbal behavior is enough. They point out that lying depends on the maintenance of emotional states which help us continue our deception. This generally requires that we internalize additional emotions, corresponding to the increased cognitive work that lying requires.

While any individual nonverbal behavior may fade far too quickly to notice, a series of nonverbal behaviors born out of these additional emotions can last much longer, making lie detection easier. The goal of this study was to attempt to isolate deceptive behaviors and to see if certain patterns of nonverbal behavior tended to correspond with deception.

They hypothesized that patterns of nonverbal behaviors would reliably indicate deception and also that more open-ended interrogations would produce a greater amount of indicative nonverbal behaviors.

In order to answer these questions, they recruited a sample of students from various ethnic backgrounds and, after some initial assessments, divided them randomly into two groups. The first group was told they would be gifted a $100 check, while the second was told they could look at but not take the same $100.

The participants were eventually given the opportunity to steal the check, after which they were told that they had been “randomly” selected for an interview. Interestingly, each of them had been previously instructed to make a point of proving their honesty, regardless of their guilt. This is where the article’s data collection truly began.

The researchers employed interrogation tactics modeled after actual law enforcement techniques and utilized of a variety of open and closed ended questions, in order to test the second hypothesis. During this process, they tracked facial expressions and other nonverbal behavior like head movements and gestures.

Overall, the experiment demonstrated broad support for both hypotheses. They found that when participants lied, they produced a lower pitch in the voice and engaged in fewer head nods, which Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang suggest may be due to greater levels of emotion on the part of the deceiver.

These findings may set a new direction for research into deception detection and nonverbal behavior. Rather than just focusing on a specific feature, it is important to understand how larger underling emotional states can create persistent changes in behavior.

Naturally, this might be a bit much for any of us to keep in our head, so it may help you out to get some professional advice on properly detecting deception!