Rihanna Breaks Her Silence

The singer tells ABC's Diane Sawyer she feels ashamed about falling for Chris Brown and says she left him as an example to other young women who might be in abusive relationships. (Nov. 5)

I have seen the full video, beyond what I show here, and here are my thoughts.

She is truly embarrassed (which she should not be) about the situation she currently is in and accepts some of the responsibility for being in love with a man who could hurt her- in this clip you can see this by the lack of eye contact with Diane. In the full interview she tends to look down and to her right, which is often where we look when we are accessing the emotional part of our brain. She likely still feels guilty for have some feelings for him. The slight downward tilting of her head could be an expression of shame.

As someone who analyzes violence in couples, the biggest predictor of future violence is previous violence and there is no "mold" for an abuser. Having seen people "take him back" this likely may have had a different outcome had it not been in the public eye. She is doing the right thing!

There is a hot spot where she shakes her head "no" when she is stating she didn't realize how much of an impact she has on these girl's lives- she always realized she was having an impact but now the impact could have consequences (instead of guiding their fashion choices) for their safety.

I had a past post with Chris Brown where he appeared on Larry King.◦

Rihanna Breaks Her Silence

More to Love: Episode Four

Melissa and Lauren are sent home.

Wow are the producers/editors reading my blog?!?!? My techie is telling me there are a larger number of people from LA hitting the site. A larger part of my work is becoming consulting in the entertainment business so no biggie. I told him I didn't care and don't do the ip look up thingy...

Last week I made some big statements,

"They will be gone and they know it, Kristian and Danielle." I guess you can have a ring and still be gone, where was Kristian in this episode? Her minutes drastically cut!

and

"Where does Luke stand in all this? A big cardboard cutout could stand in for him." This week we see him emerge (slightly).

Onto the non verbals of this episode:

Good Wife/Bad Wife

Perhaps this clip will make it into some of my training materials. We have so much emotion. Role playing. Pacifying behavior. Subtle surprise. Truth. Head tilts. Shoulder shrugs. Eye movement. Non asymmetrical mouth positions. Sadness. Happiness and True smiles. Pursed lips. Eye direction clues. One shoulder shrug. Head tilts. Hand pointing. Social smiles. Nods. Anger. Face touching. Perverse pleasure at the expense of others pain. Watch and learn from this five minute clip showing more nonverbal and body language clues that I have ever seen in any reality TV show!




Greetings
Last week I mentioned, "Look at the greetings, it will be the best indication of the relationship. Excitement seen here is important."

Who wins?

Melissa's Greeting


Heather's Greeting


More Thoughts

Mandy clearly is showing much more emotion than she has this season. Luke is not an emotional guy, but I hear and see some things in this exchange that lead me to believe that Luke has a way to go:

- Luke does not show any emotion when she expresses 'calling a boyfriend' and shows non verbal clues that he is not planning on choosing her (sigh, mouth).
- Luke says, "It is going to get more difficult, not just for me, but for you" is a warning for her. Listen to the his voice. "not just for me" is said softer- it will not be as difficult for him as it will be for her.

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More to Love: Episode Four

How We Look at the Face

Prof Schyns said: “Facial expressions and the interpretation of them are a fundamental part of human communication and our study has revealed how the brain uses facial details in order to make crucial social judgements.

“Our study suggests that facial expressions co-evolved with the brain - the former to be deciphered, the latter to decipher. With time-resolved brain data, we reveal both how the brain uses different expressive features and how long it takes to process enough information for the critical social judgements we take for granted.”

There are six basic facial expressions: happy, fear, surprise, disgust, anger and sadness. All of these expressions have distinctive characteristics that the brain can easily distinguish between.

Volunteers in the study were shown each expression on 10 different faces, five male, five female, while brain-imaging equipment monitored how quickly different parts of the brain interpreted them.

The results showed that between 140-200ms of the picture being shown, an information processing mechanism starts independently in both left and right brain hemispheres, looking first at the eyes, then the rest of the face before zooming back in on specific features associated with the basic emotions.

By the end of this process, the brain has enough information to accurately predict the emotional state of the person displaying the facial expression.

To read the entire study, click here.

Abstract: Competent social organisms will read the social signals of their peers. In primates, the face has evolved to transmit the organism's internal emotional state. Adaptive action suggests that the brain of the receiver has co-evolved to efficiently decode expression signals. Here, we review and integrate the evidence for this hypothesis. With a computational approach, we co-examined facial expressions as signals for data transmission and the brain as receiver and decoder of these signals. First, we show in a model observer that facial expressions form a lowly correlated signal set. Second, using time-resolved EEG data, we show how the brain uses spatial frequency information impinging on the retina to decorrelate expression categories. Between 140 to 200 ms following stimulus onset, independently in the left and right hemispheres, an information processing mechanism starts locally with encoding the eye, irrespective of expression, followed by a zooming out to processing the entire face, followed by a zooming back in to diagnostic features (e.g. the opened eyes in “fear”, the mouth in “happy”). A model categorizer demonstrates that at 200 ms, the left and right brain have represented enough information to predict behavioral categorization performance.

Citation: Schyns PG, Petro LS, Smith ML (2009) Transmission of Facial Expressions of Emotion Co-Evolved with Their Efficient Decoding in the Brain: Behavioral and Brain Evidence. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5625. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005625◦

How We Look at the Face

Eye Direction Clues

This is one of the many tools that along with other clues can be helpful. As with anything it is important to establish a baseline, some people can be reversed; while other do not show this at all. This is highly debated in academia, and there are studies on both sides of the validity of it. From personal experience I can tell you there are people that it most definitely works with, and others where I do not use eye movement as an indicator.

The funny thing is I do not look for it, but when I'm talking with someone where it works, it is like my subconscious mind tells me watch the direction of their eyes.

Also, it doesn't have to be their eyes, I have seen their head move in the direction matching clue areas.



An interview from Sunday Morning and for Kate Winslet she is spot on with directional clues.

PART ONE


PART TWO


One thing, there is also some debate as to what each area means. This is what I found:
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Eye Direction Clues