Facial Expressions and Emotions

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When trying to figure out whether someone's lying to me, I look for the typical signs: shifty, averted eyes, twitching, rapid blinking, and so forth. But most psychologists and body language experts will tell you that none of those indicate lying. In fact, pinpointing a lie based on physical cues only works about half of the time, making it a guessing game at best.
In lecture, we talked about Paul Ekman's 6 basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise. Ekman believes that we make unconscious flashes of expressions, called micro expressions, that demonstrate our true feelings. They are not something that we have total control of, and that is how it shows our true reactions. Some of these expressions are extremely difficult to decipher, but most can be broken down into these six categories.

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I also try looking for the typical signs to tell if someone is lying to me. I was surprised to find out using physical cues only works half the time. Some people display cues easier than others which could make an individual more suspicious of their lying even though physical cues only work half the time. I believe Paul Ekman's six basic emotions do show our true feelings. For example when a friend tells you something shocking or naturally upsetting you can tell on their facial expression, even if they try to conceal their true feelings.

I think that's really interesting because every person tries to look for signs that someone is lying to you because no one likes to be lied to. It is interesting that only about half of the time are physical cues accurate signs that someone is lying. I think that the reason we do look for those physical cues is partly due to evolution. Clearly, at some point our ancestors who watched for signs that people were lying reproduce better and that skill was passed on. I do think it is interesting that we have micro-expressions because if you have ever asked someone if they wanted to go to X movie that night and they really didn't want to go to, most of the time they will hesitate and then say yes and it is that split second when they are thinking of their true emotions before they can hide what they truly think to please you.

I think that we can see these micro-expressions in the, you guessed it, little things. After seeing a couple of episodes of "Lie to Me" these little expressions can be seen in flared nostrils, the shallow furrows above our eyebrows, etc. It is a very interesting concept to find the cues when you are being lied to, because it is difficult to distinguish between unique, individual eccentricities and hard, cold lying.

As creepy as it sounds I find reading people and looking for all of the different expressions to be very interesting. A show called Lie to Me, even though it is not one hundred percent factual, covers these micro-expressions and started my interest in Psychology. Therefore I found this section quite interesting and agree that it is something that is very difficult to learn how to read people.

These microexpressions have been referenced in shows such as "Lie to Me" where they examine a person's face to determine the truth behind the lies, so to speak. However, it is somewhat shocking to see how many people don't pick up on any nonverbal cues at all. While some of us are programmed to be more detail oriented than others, some people seem to just be completely lacking in the topic. Even in the show they mentioned there are some people who are born naturally knowing how to read microexpressions on a person's face.

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This page contains a single entry by shrag022 published on March 31, 2012 10:44 PM.

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