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◦
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
How We Look at the Face
Friday, July 10, 2009
Asymmetry of the Face Translates to Likability
So often we are looking at the movement of the facial muscles, while there can be certain things learned by the measurements of the face. You can correlate this to certain assumptions, such as combining it with data about the ability to tell lies based on attractiveness.
Paul Ekman talks about an associate he had that could tell, from wanted photographs, what type of crime he committed. Could determine which isolated tribe was peaceful and which was violent.
We also know as we grow older our most common emotion becomes painted on our faces, (and the most attractive older Americans have smiles painted on their faces) so we can determine long term base emotions.
Knowing more about the face makes the information more clearer.
The Science:
Symmetry Is Related to Sexual Dimorphism in Faces: Data Across Culture and Species
Many animals both display and assess multiple signals. Two prominently studied traits are symmetry and sexual dimorphism, which, for many animals, are proposed cues to heritable fitness benefits. These traits are associated with other potential benefits, such as fertility. In humans, the face has been extensively studied in terms of attractiveness. Faces have the potential to be advertisements of mate quality and both symmetry and sexual dimorphism have been linked to the attractiveness of human face shape.
Read the full article by clicking here.
Citation: Little AC, Jones BC, Waitt C, Tiddeman BP, Feinberg DR, et al. (2008) Symmetry Is Related to Sexual Dimorphism in Faces: Data Across Culture and Species. PLoS ONE 3(5): e2106. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002106◦
Monday, July 6, 2009
Innerscope Research Analysis of News Shows
Innerscope’s approach is the latest in a wave of ever more sophisticated emotion-sensing technologies. The latest technologies could soon be built into everyday gadgets to smooth our interactions with them.
“It’s a rapidly growing market – our revenues this year are four times what they were last year,” says Carl Marci, the chief executive officer and chief scientist for the company running the experiment, Innerscope Research, based in Boston, Massachusetts.◦
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Prediction: Next Season 'Lie to Me' Science Behind the Show Spotlight
Blinking during and after lying.
As cognitive processing occurs there is a decrease in eye blinks, directly followed by an increase in blinking after the lie is told. Truth tellers do not change blink rate...
For more about the science of deception:
Blinking during and after lying. Leal, Sharon; Vrij, Aldert; Journal of Nonverbal
Behavior, Vol 32(4), Dec 2008. pp. 187-194. [Journal Article]◦
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