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The few previous studies testing whether or not microexpressions are indicators of deception have produced equivocal findings, which may have resulted from restrictive operationalizations of microexpression duration. In this study, we coded facial expressions of emotion produced by community participants in an initial screening interview in a mock crime experiment. The expressions were coded for occurrence and duration and various durations were tested concerning whether their occurrence differentiated between truthtellers and liars concerning their intent to commit a malicious act in the future. We operationalized microexpressions as expressions occurring less than the duration of spontaneously occurring, non-concealed, non-repressed facial expressions of emotion based on empirically documented findings, that is < .50 s, and then more systematically < .40, < .30, and < .20 s. We also compared expressions occurring between .50 – 6.00 s and all expressions < 6.00 s. Results indicated that microexpressions of negative emotions occurring < .40 and < .50 s differentiated truthtellers and liars. Expressions of negative emotions occurring < 6.00 s also differentiated truthtellers from liars but this finding did not survive when expressions < 1.00 s were filtered from the data. These findings provided the first systematic evidence for the existence of microexpressions at various durations and their possible ability to differentiate truthtellers from liars about their intent to commit an act of malfeasance in the future.

Micro expressions are brief facial expressions displayed when people attempt to conceal, hide, or repress their emotions. They are difficult to detect in real time, yet individuals who can accurately identify micro expressions receive higher workplace evaluations and can better detect deception. Two studies featuring college students and security officers examined background factors that may account for accuracy differences when reading micro expressions, both before and after training. Study 1 revealed that college students who were younger and high in openness to experience were better at recognizing micro expressions. However, individual differences did not predict improvement in micro expression recognition gained through training. Study 2 revealed experiential factors such as prior facial expression training and lack of law enforcement experience were more predictive of micro expression recognition than personality or demographic factors. Individuals in both studies showed recognition improvement with training, and the implications of the ability to improve at micro expression recognition are discussed in the context of security and interpersonal situations.

Most studies on judgments of facial expressions of emotion have primarily utilized prototypical, high-intensity expressions. This paper examines judgments of subtle facial expressions of emotion, including not only low-intensity versions of full-face prototypes but also variants of those prototypes. A dynamic paradigm was used in which observers were shown a neutral expression followed by the target expression to judge, and then the neutral expression again, allowing for a simulation of the emergence of the expression from and then return to a baseline. We also examined how signal and intensity clarities of the expressions (explained more fully in the Introduction) were associated with judgment agreement levels. Low-intensity, full-face prototypical expressions of emotion were judged as the intended emotion at rates significantly greater than chance. A number of the proposed variants were also judged as the intended emotions. Both signal and intensity clarities were individually associated with agreement rates; when their interrelationships were taken into account, signal clarity independently predicted agreement rates but intensity clarity did not. The presence or absence of specific muscles appeared to be more important to agreement rates than their intensity levels, with the exception of the intensity of zygomatic major, which was positively correlated with agreement rates for judgments of joy.

Provides scholarly reviews of state-of-the-art knowledge in the areas of nonverbal communication and nonverbal behaviours and includes an entire section devoted to new and improved methodologies and technologies that allow for the recording, capture, and analysis of nonverbal behaviours. The primary audience for the book is researchers in the area, as well as by students in graduate-level classes on nonverbal communication or behaviour. The handbook is organised around four broad themes, each of which led to a different section in this volume:* The first concerns the history of the field and includes two chapters providing an overview and history of the area, all written by senior researchers with many years of experience.* The second concerns the factors of influence of nonverbal communication and encompasses the main theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which research on nonverbal communication occurs.* The third theme presents the separate sources of nonverbal communication and behaviour and includes chapters on the physical environment, appearance and physiognomy, olfactics and odour, facial expressions, voice, gesture, eye behaviour and gaze, and postures, gait, proxemics, and haptics. This section also includes a chapter on nonverbal communication in nonhuman primates.* The final theme concerns advances in research methodologies, and includes chapters on the methods for measuring and analysing facial expressions, voice, gesture, eye behaviour, olfactics, body movements, and nonverbal sensitivity.

Emotions are important to much research in consumer science. Consequently, finding valid and reliable ways of measuring emotions is crucial. This chapter focuses on how to understand and approach measuring emotions through an unobtrusive, objective methodology: assessing facial expressions of emotion. We discuss both direct and indirect approaches to measuring facial expressions. As a direct method of measuring facial expressions, our approach is based on theoretical, empirical, anatomical, and physiological aspects of facial expressions of emotion. As an indirect method, this chapter discusses observer judgments of produced facial expressions. It is critical for researchers to be aware of the pros, cons, caveats, and limitations of each method, indicating that the method of how to measure and understand facial expressions should be determined depending on the research purpose.

Despite the fact that facial expressions of emotion have signal value, there is surprisingly little research examining how that signal can be detected under various conditions, because most judgment studies utilize full-face, frontal views. We remedy this by obtaining judgments of frontal and profile views of the same expressions displayed by the same expressors. We predicted that recognition accuracy when viewing faces in profile would be lower than when judging the same faces from the front. Contrarily, there were no differences in recognition accuracy as a function of view, suggesting that emotions are judged equally well regardless of from what angle they are viewed.

In this article, the authors integrate the seemingly disparate literature on culture and emotion by offering a biocultural model of emotion that offers three premises heretofore not introduced in the literature: (1) emotions need to be distinguished from other affective phenomena, (2) different types of emotions exist, and (3) within any emotion different domains can be studied. Previous controversies have occurred because writers have called all affective states “emotion” without regard to the type or domain of emotion sampled. The authors argue that not all affective states should be called emotion, that emotions that may be biologically innate are different than those that are not, and that different domains of emotion are more relatively influenced by biology or culture. The authors offer researchers a terminology—biological versus cultural emotions, Priming Reactions, Subjective Experience, and Emotional Meanings—provide hypotheses concerning the relative contributions of biology and culture, review the available literature that supports those hypotheses, and argue that the literature can be somewhat neatly integrated into a cohesive whole. The authors contend that the relative contribution of biological and cultural factors to emotion depends on what emotion is being studied and the specific domain of emotion assessed. While the authors acknowledge that their delineations are not the only or the best delineations that can or should be used, they contend that some kind of delineations should be made and can help to synthesize and integrate a large and seemingly disparate, contradictory literature. The authors offer theirs as a first step in this effort.

Previous judgment studies of facial expressions of emotion in context have provided mixed results. These contradictory findings arise, in part, because of a lack of consideration of the different aspects of context with which facial expressions of emotion can be combined, and different meanings of face-context pairings vis-a`-vis real-life phenomena. In this paper, we provide a framework of how faces and contexts combine and describe possible meanings of consistent and inconsistent face-context pairings. We also discuss methodological caveats that should be considered in the conduct of such judgment studies. We argue that future research in this area will benefit not from more studies of different combinations of stimuli created merely because we have the technological ability to create them, but instead from careful consideration of the ecological validity of the various types of combinations that can be produced, and their meaning.

The face is the most representative channel of nonverbal behaviors, and it is the channel most studied by scientists. Studies on face and facial expression have their roots in Darwin (The expression of emotion in man and animals. Oxford University Press, New York, 1872) seminal work that suggested that emotions are biologically innate and evolutionarily adaptive and that facial expressions evolved as a universal skill in all humans. The face is a channel that can produce both involuntary reactions and voluntary reactions. This chapter will introduce facial expressions as one of the primary nonverbal channels that express universal emotions and present scientific evidence for the universality of facial expressions of emotion, including studies of humans across cultures, blind individuals, twins and families, infants, and nonhuman primates. In addition, cultural display rules that can explain cultural variations in facial expressions of emotions across cultures are introduced.

Emotions have been defined as transient, bio-psycho-social reactions to events that have consequences for our welfare and potentially require immediate action (see entry on Emotion). They are biological because they involve bodily responses. They are psychological because they involve specific mental processes required for elicitation and regulation of response and affect. And they are social because they are often elicited in interactions, and have meaning to those interactions. (We use the word “social” here in the broadest sense in relation to our evolutionary history, which includes interactions not only with other humans, but also with other living beings, such as snakes, bears, wild pigs, etc.) Keywords: cross-cultural psychology; emotion; universality studies

Cultural display rules are cultural norms learned early in life that govern the regulation of expressive behaviors depending on social contexts. Keywords: emotion

Just as cultures have display rules that govern the management and modification of emotional expressions, they have cultural decoding rules that govern the management of emotional perception. Keywords: emotion; perception