The biggest stack at the end of Day 1 belongs to Larry Tull with David Matsumoto and Igor Sharaskin the only other players to crack the 100,000-chip mark. Other notables going to Day 2 include Josh Arieh, Alex Luneau, Jared Bleznick, Shaun Deeb, Matt Glantz, and Anthony Zinno. First we should recognize, as David Matsumoto has pointed out, that there are behaviors, gestures, or expressions of the face that do occur without conscious prompting and which leak or reveal our.

1. David Matsumoto Poker Club
2. David Matsumoto Poker
3. David Matsumoto Poker Show

David Matsumoto, is Professor of Psychology at San Francisco State University and Director of Humintell, LLC. He has studied culture, nonverbal behavior, and emotion for over 30 years and has published over 120 journal articles in peer-reviewed, scientific journals. His books include Culture and Psychology, the Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology, and Cross-Cultural Research Methods in Psychology. He is the recipient of many awards and honors in the field of psychology, including being named a G. Stanley Hall lecturer by the American Psychological Association. He is the series editor for Cambridge University Press’ series on Culture and Psychology and is Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.

Hyi Sung Hwang, is a Research Scientist at Humintell, LLC. Her research interests are in emotion, nonverbal behaviors, and culture. She is an expert at the Facial Action Coding System and in the conduct of research examining facial expressions and other nonverbal behaviors. She is co-creator of many of the training tools used to teach law enforcement officers and many other individuals how to recognize micro and subtle facial expressions of emotion. She is an author of a number of scientific publications and conference presentations in this area and is co-editor, with David Matsumoto and Mark Frank, of an upcoming book entitled Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications.

Emotions are an incredibly important aspect of human life and basic research on emotions of the past few decades has produced several discoveries that have led to important real world applications. In this article we describe two of those discoveries – the universality of facial expressions of emotion and the existence of microexpressions – because of their importance to and novelty in psychology. We discuss how we have taken those discoveries to create programs that teach people how to read facial expressions of emotion, as well as recent research that has validated those training programs and documented their efficacy.

Two Important Scientific Discoveries

The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Arguably the most important contribution basic science has made to our understanding of emotion concerns the universality of facial expressions of emotion. Darwin (1872) was the first to suggest that they were universal; his ideas about emotions were a centerpiece of his theory of evolution, suggesting that emotions and their expressions were biologically innate and evolutionarily adaptive, and that similarities in them could be seen phylogenetically. Early research testing Darwin’s ideas, however, was inconclusive (Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972), and the dominant perspective in psychology was that facial expressions were culture-specific – that is, just as every culture had its own verbal language, it had its own language of facial expressions. Darwin’s claims were resurrected by Tomkins (1962, 1963), who suggested that emotion was the basis of human motivation and that the seat of emotion was in the face. Tomkins conducted the first study demonstrating that facial expressions were reliably associated with certain emotional states (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964).

Later, Tomkins recruited Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard to conduct what is known today as the “universality studies.” The first of these demonstrated high cross-cultural agreement in judgments of emotions in faces by people in both literate (Ekman, 1972, 1973; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971) and preliterate cultures (Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman, et al., 1969). Then Friesen’s (1972) study documented that the same facial expressions of emotion were produced spontaneously by members of very different cultures in reaction to emotion-eliciting films.

Since the original universality studies more than 30 studies examining judgments of facial expressions have replicated the universal recognition of emotion in the face (reviewed in Matsumoto, 2001). In addition a meta-analysis of 168 datasets examining judgments of emotion in the face and other nonverbal stimuli indicated universal emotion recognition well above chance levels (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a). And there have been over 75 studies that have demonstrated that these very same facial expressions are produced when emotions are elicited spontaneously (Matsumoto, Keltner, Shiota, Frank, & O'Sullivan, 2008). These findings are impressive given that they have been produced by different researchers around the world in different laboratories using different methodologies with participants from many different cultures but all converging on the same set of results. Thus there is strong evidence for the universal facial expressions of seven emotions – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Seven Basic Emotions and their Universal Expressions.

Other bodies of evidence provide support for the biological and genetic sources of facial expressions of emotion. For example, when emotions are spontaneously aroused even congenitally blind individuals produce the same facial expressions as sighted individuals do (Cole, Jenkins, & Shott, 1989; Galati, Miceli, & Sini, 2001; Galati, Sini, Schmidt, & Tinti, 2003; Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009). Facial behaviors of blind individuals are more concordant with kin than with strangers (Peleg et al., 2006), and some facial expressions to emotionally-provocative stimuli are more concordant among monozygotic twin pairs than dizygotic twins (Kendler et al., 2008). The same facial musculature that exists in adult humans exists in newborn infants and is fully functional at birth (Ekman & Oster, 1979). That same facial musculature that humans use for emotion signaling is also present in chimpanzees (Bard, 2003; Burrows, Waller, Parr, & Bonar, 2006), and the facial expressions considered to be universal among humans have been observed in nonhuman primates (de Waal, 2003).

Microexpressions

A second important discovery concerns the existence of microexpressions. When single emotions occur and there is no reason for them to be modified or concealed, expressions typically last between 0.5 to 4 seconds and involve the entire face (Ekman, 2003). We call these macroexpressions; they occur whenever we are alone or with family and close friends. Macroexpressions are relatively easy to see if one knows what to look for. Microexpressions, however, are expressions that go on and off the face in a fraction of a second, sometimes as fast as 1/30 of a second. They are so fast that if you blink you would miss them.

Microexpressions are likely signs of concealed emotions. (They may also be signs of rapidly processed but unconcealed emotional states.) They occur so fast that most people cannot see or recognize them in real time. The idea that microexpressions exist has its roots in Darwin’s (1872) inhibition hypothesis that suggested that facial actions that cannot be controlled voluntarily may be produced involuntarily even if the individual is trying to control his or her expressions. Research on the neuroanatomical bases of emotional expressions suggests how this occurs. There are two neural pathways that mediate facial expressions, each originating in a different area of the brain (Rinn, 1984). The pyramidal tract drives voluntary facial actions and originates in the cortical motor strip, whereas the extrapyramidal tract drives involuntary emotional expressions and originates in subcortical areas of the brain. When individuals are in intensely emotional situations but need to control their expressions they activate both systems, which engage in a neural “tug of war” over control of the face, allowing for the quick, fleeting leakage of microexpressions.

The existence of microexpressions was verified almost a century after Darwin by Haggard & Isaacs (1966) while scanning films of psychotherapy sessions in slow motion. Later Ekman & Friesen (1974) demonstrated that microexpressions occurred in their frame by frame analysis of interviews with depressed inpatients. Most recently Porter & ten Brinke (2008) demonstrated that microexpressions occurred when individuals attempted to be deceitful about their emotional expressions.

Real World Applications of the Basic Science of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Findings concerning the universality of facial expressions of emotion and the existence of microexpressions can help people in a range of professions requiring face-to-face interactions improve their skills in reading the emotions of others. Reading facial expressions of emotion, and especially microexpressions, can aid the development of rapport, trust, and collegiality; they can be useful in making credibility assessments, evaluating truthfulness and detecting deception; and better information about emotional states provides the basis for better cooperation, negotiation, or sales. Health professionals can develop better rapport with patients, interact humanely with empathy and compassion, and make the right diagnosis by obtaining complete information. Teachers can read the emotions of their students to obtain cues about the progress of their lesson plans so they can adjust accordingly and deliver them more effectively. School administrators who read the emotions of their teachers can reduce burnout and maintain and improve teacher effectiveness. Businesspersons and negotiators who can read the emotions of others can nurture mutually beneficial collaborations. Product researchers can improve the qualitative data they obtain from consumers by reading consumer’s emotions when evaluating products, giving hints as to what they truly feel despite what they say about it. Parents, spouses, friends, and everyone with an interest in building strong and constructive relationships can benefit from improving their ability to read emotions.

People often get emotional when they lie, especially when the stakes are high. These emotions can occur because of the fear of getting caught, guilt or shame about the event lied about, or even because one likes the thought of successfully lying to others, especially those in positions of authority. Facial expressions, especially microexpressions, can be signs of these emotions and the ability to detect them may be important for individuals working in law enforcement, national security, intelligence, or the legal system. Individuals and organizations with interests in detecting lies have used programs we have developed that are based on information that has been substantiated in scientific research and informed by law enforcement experience observed in the real world by officers and agents who have worked with us. Our instructor-led training programs involve a combination of didactic, individual-, and group-based participatory exercises. We introduce trainees to knowledge about the nature of emotion; facial expressions, microexpressions, and other nonverbal behaviors including voice, gesture, gaze, and posture; and the nature of truth telling and lying and the nonverbal signals associated with both. Trainees use our training tools to improve their skills at reading micro- and subtle facial expressions of emotion. And they put these newfound skills and knowledge together by watching videos of actual interviews or interrogations, seeing what they have been missing. They often find over the course of the training that they are able to see and understand behavior that they previously could not understand or had misinterpreted, and these additional skills help them to find ground truth in testimony, depositions, interviews, and interrogations. These new skill sets complement their existing skill sets, not substitute for them, and help trainees to be more accurate and more efficient in their jobs.

Our training curriculum also includes stand-alone courses that people can access from anywhere via the internet. Our microexpression recognition training tools help people improve their ability to recognize microexpressions when they occur. They all include a pre-test so that users can gauge their natural propensity to see microexpressions; an instructional section providing audio and videos describing each of the universal facial expressions of emotion; a practice section where users can practice seeing microexpressions, with the ability to replay and freeze-frame on the expression to maximize learning; a review section where users can once again see examples of the universal expressions; and a post-test to assess their improvement. Our latest studies in this area have shown that training with our tools produces a reliable benefit not only at the end of the training but also that lasts beyond the training session and carries over into the work environment (Matsumoto & Hwang, in press). In this study the benefits of training were retained for two to three weeks after training in a sample of trial consultants, and improved emotion recognition scores were positively correlated with third party ratings of emotional and communication skills on the job for retail store employees.

Our stand-alone courses also include tools to help train people to see and recognize subtle expressions. Subtle expressions are emotional expressions that occur when a person is just starting to feel an emotion, when the emotional response is of low intensity, or when a person is trying to cover up their emotions but is not being entirely able to do so. They can involve the same muscles in a full-face expression just expressed at very low intensities. Or they can involve just parts of the face, such as just the brows and eyes, or just the mouth. Although microexpressions have received a lot of media attention in the past few years, research has shown that the ability to read subtle expressions better predicts the ability to detect deception than the ability to read microexpressions (Warren, Schertler, & Bull, 2009). This makes sense because even though microexpressions are clearly signs of concealed emotions, they probably occur much less frequently than subtle expressions. This is true not only in deceptive situations but in most emotional situations in everyday life. Thus the ability to see and recognize subtle expressions likely has a much higher benefit for practitioners. Designed much like our microexpression recognition tools described above, our latest studies indicate that people using our subtle expression training tools can reliably improve their ability to see subtle expressions (Hwang & Matsumoto, 2010). Given that subtle expressions occur in real life more frequently than micros or macros, and given that the ability to recognize subtle expressions is associated with the ability to detect deception, the availability of tools to train the ability to see subtle expressions is a major advantage for practitioners.

Our instructor-led and stand-alone training programs are in use in training personnel in a variety of agencies and professions, including those entering the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department, airport security personnel of the Transportation Security Agency, the U.S. Marshall’s Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Academy, and other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

Conclusion

Because facial expressions of emotion are part of our evolutionary history and are a biologically innate ability, we all have the ability to read them. It is an ability that gets better on the job in our everyday lives. This is especially true for macroexpressions. But most people are not very good at recognizing micro or subtle expressions. The average accuracy rates for people prior to training in Matsumoto & Hwang’s (in press) study was 48%; if joy and surprise – the two easiest expressions to see – are excluded, then that accuracy rate drops to 35%. And there are many individual differences. Fortunately, as mentioned above, tools have been developed to help people improve their skills regardless of what level of natural ability they have. Thus if one is in a profession where the ability to read facial expressions of emotion – especially micro and subtle expressions – may help one be more efficient or accurate, then there are resources available to do so.

But the improved ability to read facial expressions, or any nonverbal behavior, is just the first step. What one does with the information is an important second step in the process of interaction. Being overly sensitive to nonverbal behaviors such as microexpressions and other forms of nonverbal leakage can be detrimental to interpersonal outcomes as well, as discussed in the literature on eavesdropping (Blanck, Rosenthal, Snodgrass, DePaulo, & Zuckerman, 1981; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002b; Rosenthal & DePaulo, 1979). Individuals who call out other’s emotions indiscriminately can be considered intrusive, rude, or overbearing. Dealing effectively with emotion information about others is also likely to be a crucial part of the skill set one must have to interact effectively with others. Knowing when and how to intervene, to adapt one’s behaviors and communication styles, or engage the support and help of others, are all skills that must be brought into play once emotions are read.

Acknowledgements

Portions of this report were prepared with the support of research grant W91WAW-08-C-0024 from the Army Research Institute, and FA9550-09-1-0281 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to the first author.

References

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The views expressed in Science Briefs are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions or policies of APA.

Episode 34

If you think reading people is not a science, think again. Understanding expressions that only appear on someone’s face for tenths of a second can mean a lot to those who know what to look for. In this episode, psychologist and nonverbal communication expert David Matsumoto, PhD, talks about why nonverbal communication is so important in everything from police investigations to intercultural exchanges.

About the expert: David Matsumoto, PhD

David Matsumoto, PhD, is a renowned expert in the field of facial expression, gesture, nonverbal behavior, emotion and culture. He has published more than 400 articles, manuscripts, book chapters and books on these subjects. Since 1989, Matsumoto has been a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. He is also the founder and director of SFSU’s Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory, as well as the founder of Humintell.

Matsumoto is also the head instructor of the East Bay Judo Institute in El Cerrito, California. He holds a 7th degree black belt and has won countless awards, including the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Coach of the Year Award in 2003. Matsumoto served as the head coach of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Judo Team and was the team leader for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Judo Team.

Transcript

Audrey Hamilton: A fleeting change in someone’s face or body language can signal a lot of different emotions. Why do people’s faces change when they’re angry or sad? In this episode, we speak with a psychologist and expert in facial expression, gestures and other nonverbal behavior about how not speaking can speak volumes. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is “Speaking of Psychology.”

David Matsumoto is a professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory at San Francisco State University. An expert on facial expressions, nonverbal behavior and deception, he is director of Humintell, a company that conducts research and training for organizations such as the Transportation Security Administration, the FBI and the U.S. Marshalls Service. Welcome, Dr. Matsumoto.

David Matsumoto: Thank you for having me.

Audrey Hamilton: We’re probably all familiar with the universal facial expressions of our emotions – you know, anger, joy, sadness – you know, those are some of them. Can you give examples of some of the less obvious facial expressions? I think you call them microexpressions, you know where someone is maybe attempting to conceal his or her emotions. These are much harder to detect. Is that right?

David Matsumoto: Microexpressions are unconscious, extremely quick, sometimes full-face expressions of an emotion. And sometimes they’re partial and very subtle expressions of emotion. But because they’re extremely quick and because they’re unconscious, when they occur, they occur often times less than half a second – sometimes as fast as one-tenth of a second or even one-fifteenth of a second. Most people don’t even see them. Some people do see them but they don’t know what they’re seeing. They see something that has changed on the face, but they don’t know exactly what is was that was changed.

Audrey Hamilton: It’s fleeting?

David Matsumoto: It’s very fleeting, but if you take a freeze frame on it on a video, you’ll see that a lot of times there’s a big facial expression that is very clear about what the person’s mental state is.

Audrey Hamilton: It all sounds very interesting, but how is this useful in the real world? You work with numerous organizations like I mentioned – the FBI, the TSA – to help train interrogators and business people in the skill of reading people. Tell us about your applied work in training programs.

David Matsumoto: Well, learning to read microexpressions and nonverbal behaviors in general can be very valuable for anyone whose job it is to understand other people’s true feelings, their thoughts, their motivations, their personalities or their intentions. So obviously, there’s an application for people who are doing interviews or interrogations. That would be people in the criminal justice system, law enforcement, national security, intelligence – those are the kinds of people that we primarily work with because their job is to try to find about whether a person is concealing facts or concealing knowledge or concealing something or has some information that would be useful for solving a crime or getting some other kinds of information. And so, when one wants to be able to do that it’s very useful to be able to read these microexpressions.

But again, the application is very clear for anybody whose job it is to be able to get that kind of additional insight – what I call data superiority – for the individual who’s observing others. So it could be for sales people. It could be for the legal profession. It could be for healthcare professionals or psychotherapists. Medical doctors. Sales person, I think I mentioned sales person. Anybody whose job it is to gain some additional insight about the person that you’re talking with so that you can leverage that information for a particular outcome.

Audrey Hamilton: I imagine these skills are particularly important in intercultural exchanges. Are facial expressions and gestures different in other cultures and can you give us some examples?

David Matsumoto: Well, facial expressions of emotion are universal in the sense that everybody around the world regardless of race, culture, nationality, sex, gender, etc., whatever the demographic variable is, we all show the same facial muscle expressions on our faces when we have the same emotions.

Now, of course, the question is context will moderate all of that and what kinds of things bring about different emotions in different cultures. So, of course, there are cultural differences and large individual differences in when people express emotions and how they express them when they feel the emotions. But if there’s no reason to change anything when people are feeling extremely strong emotions and they can express it freely, they will express those emotions on their faces in exactly the same ways.

Gestures are very different. There are many different types of gestures and so the two types of gestures that we generally work with are called speech illustrators and emblems. Speech illustrators are these gestures that accompany speech that when you see a person using their hands when they’re talking to illustrate a point; they’re like animation. They’re like how we use our voice. They’re functionally universal in the sense that everybody around the world uses hand gestures as speech illustrators. But people around the world differ in the amount that they do them and in the form. So if you can picture people waving around. Some people in some cultures wave around their hands in a certain way. Some people point when they talk. Some people are doing various different types of things with their hands when they talk. So the form in which the illustrator occurs is different, but the function is the same across different cultures.

Emblems is another type of gesture. These are generally culturally specific. These are gestures that refer to specific words or phrases. So, if you can imagine, the listeners can imagine the thumbs up, which has a meaning around the world, which is like “OK” or “good.” These things are culture specific, so every culture, just as every culture has a verbal vocabulary – different verbal vocabulary – every culture creates a vocabulary of emblematic gestures that correspond to certain types of phrases that they think are important to have in a gesture.

So those are very culture specific. Now what’s really interesting about that is that some of our most recent research published a couple of years ago has shown that some gestures are beginning to be universally recognized around the world, like head nods for yes and head shakes for no. Of course, there’s places around the world that still do them in different ways. But they are increasingly being recognized universally around the world, probably because of a lot of shared mass media and because of the Internet or movies and things like that. So, in summary, with nonverbal behaviors, there’s some aspects of it that are very universal and some aspects of it that are culturally specific.

Audrey Hamilton: Some of your research has involved the study of blind athletes. I thought this was interesting. Can you tell us how that research has furthered your understanding of human emotions?

David Matsumoto: Yeah, well to tell you the truth, one of the pervasive questions about facial expressions of emotion in the past has been whether they’re universal or not and I think there’s very conclusive evidence about the universality of facial expressions of emotion.

Then, the next question becomes where do they come from? Because it could be that we are all born with some kind of innate skill that is an evolutionarily based kind of adaptation that we share with non-human primates and other animals. Or it could be that humans have just all around the world learned, regardless of where they are, from the time that they’re infants. So it could be something that is learned or something that is biologically innate.

Now studying blind individuals, and especially congenitally blind individuals, is a particularly great thing to do to address this particular research question because when you study blind individuals and you study their expressions you know that as long as they were congenitally blind that there was no way that they could possibly learn to see those expressions and put them on their faces from birth because they’ve been blind from birth. And so when you study a population like that it helps you address a certain research question. And so in the studies that we’ve done, we’ve actually studied the spontaneous facial expressions of blind individuals from around the world from many different cultures and we show that in the same emotionally evocative situations that blind individuals produce on their faces exactly the same facial muscle configurations where the same emotions as sighted individuals do. And again, because these are individuals who are blind from birth, there’s no way that they could have possibly learned to do that by seeing others do it.

David Matsumoto Poker Club

And so it leads me to think and many others to believe that the ability to have facial expressions of emotion is something that is biologically innate and that we are all born with.

I’ve done judo for 48 years of my life here and I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of our Olympic movement in judo. I was the Olympic coach for the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games for the United States. We studied the expressions of the athletes in the sighted – in the regular Olympic Games – for these are all sighted individuals and we study their expressions right at the moment they won or lost their medal match. And we’re taking photographs. These are high-speed photographs – eight shots per second with a very expensive camera – and so we can track the expressions – you know in minute second by second or fractions of a second resolution – right at the time of winning or losing the match. And we also could see the expression of the same athletes on the podium 30 minutes later in a social context. So we could do that comparison.

Two weeks after the Olympic Games, every Olympics, what happens in every Olympics is the Paralympics rolls into town using exactly the same venue. So my guy was there still and every sport has a different disability. For judo, it’s blindness. So all of the judo athletes in the judo Paralympic Games are all blind. Half of them or some degree of them are congenitally blind and some are acquired blindness through some kind of disease or accident (there are no differences between them, by the way). But anyway, we were able to do the same kind of study with the Paralympic judo blind athletes in the Paralympic Games.

When you compare the expressions of the blind athletes in the Paralympic Games to the sighted athletes in the regular Olympic Games, what you find is that for the winners – winners and losers – they all do the same thing. We measure the exact facial muscle movements that are occurring right at the time of winning or losing that match. So I think the correspondence – the correlation between the facial muscle movements is something like 0.9 or some incredibly high number that you never see in research nowadays – so that correspondence is amazingly high between the blind and the sighted athletes.

What’s really interesting about blind athletes is this – or sighted – if we asked our listeners to show on their faces what do you do, what do you show, what do you think you do on your face when you express anger? Everybody can give you something and it will be pretty much accurate. And the reason is because all of us have seen it. We’ve seen it in ourselves if we’ve seen ourselves angry in the mirror. Or we see it in others when they’re angry. So we see it. We know what it looks like. We’ve seen ourselves do it. We know what it feels like. A blind athlete has never seen it. So if you ask a blind person, “Hey, show me what you look like when you’re angry or when you’re sad,” you’ll get something that’s close but you don’t get the exact facial muscle movements that occur when those emotions occur spontaneously. However, when it occurs spontaneously, the exact facial muscle movements are exactly the same. So blind individuals produce them spontaneously but don’t produce exactly the same thing when you ask them to pose whereas sighted people do.

Audrey Hamilton: Interesting.

David Matsumoto: And so this to me is another example of how there’s differences between the blind and the sighted and why they are because this is a biologically innate thing. They can do it when it’s spontaneous.

Audrey Hamilton: Well, thank you Dr. Matsumoto for joining us today. It’s been very interesting.

David Matsumoto Poker

David Matsumoto: My pleasure.

David Matsumoto Poker Show

Audrey Hamilton: For more information on Dr. Matsumoto’s work and to hear more episodes, please go to our website. With the American Psychological Association’s “Speaking of Psychology,” I’m Audrey Hamilton.