In this video I discuss the importance of emotional expression in social interaction and how we use signals from others to gauge their emotional states. This also relates to display rules for when it’s appropriate to express certain emotions and attempts we make to deceive others by intensifying, de-intensifying, masking, or neutralizing our facial expressions. Next I discuss potential cues for assessing the authenticity of an emotional expression, including morphology, symmetry, duration, and temporal patterning. Lastly I consider other techniques for assessing when someone is telling the truth and the accuracy of polygraphs for detecting lying via physiological changes.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I talked about how we broadcast our emotional state to others and we do this in a number of ways, and we try to identify the emotional states of others based on the signals that they’re sending out. And some of these signals are not completely under our control. We can be broadcasting something about our emotional state without even realizing that we’re doing so. And so this brings up the idea that our emotional state and how we broadcast it to others plays an important role in our social interactions.

So we can think about how often you use these cues to try to guess about somebody’s emotional state. You might do this through their posture, right? If they’re sitting up straight and they had their head head sort of lifted high, you might assume they’re feeling differently than if they have their head sort of dropped and their shoulders kind of slouched over, right? So that might be a signal to you about how someone’s feeling.

You might also use their eye gaze. So when we interact with people and we look at each other you might notice if you’re having a conversation with somebody and they’re constantly looking somewhere else. That might indicate you that they’re bored by what you’re saying or that they’re more interested in something else on the other side of the room. And this is the reason why we have whites around our eyes, as we can see where other people are looking and that’s an important social cue, right? We want to know what other people are thinking and looking at their eyes is one way of trying to work that out. This is part of the reason why somebody who always wears, you know, dark or mirrored sunglasses, right, you can’t see their eyes, it kind of hides something there. You’re not able to get that signal anymore and so it’s a little bit harder to figure out what is this person up to? What are they thinking about?

But we also use, of course, our facial expressions in broadcasting our emotions. This is probably the most common way that we try to express things is through movements of the muscles of our faces. So in the previous video I talked about Ekman’s idea that there were six basic universal human emotions and these were; disgust, joy, fear, anger, sadness, and surprise. Now of course we can express more than these six emotions and we can express them in slightly different ways; there’s much more subtlety and nuance here. And it’s also possible that there could be other emotional expressions that are also universal. So later Ekman proposed that there was actually a seventh basic emotion and this was contempt. And he thought that sort of a sneer could indicate contempt and that this could also be recognized by people around the world.

Now this idea that there’s more subtlety and nuance to our emotional expression especially in different social situations brings us to what are called “display rules“. This is the idea that we express emotions differently in different settings and that there’s different rules for how we express emotions. So you might think about your facial expressions at the funeral versus at a party. It doesn’t really matter what it is that you think, how funny something you think of while you’re at a funeral is, you probably don’t want to have a big broad smile on your face. That wouldn’t be appropriate. Similarly if you are thinking about something particularly depressing at a party, you might not want to show that to others. If you’re really just not having a good time and you’re not in a good mood, you might still try to force a smile. So this brings us to the ways that we can try to hide our real emotional state. We can try to deceive others in terms of what we’re actually thinking and how we are expressing ourselves.

In some cases we might try to intensify our emotional state. So when you get that fairly boring Christmas gift that you’re not particularly interested in but of course you want to show a high level of joy when you open the package. You might really try to intensify your joy; you might try to smile more broadly and indicate that wow, this, this is really exactly what you wanted even though that might not be the case. In some cases you might try to de-intensify your expression of an emotion. So let’s say you have a crush on your friend’s girlfriend and when you see them together and they come over to greet you, you might not want to show too much enthusiasm for seeing her. So you might try to think oh you know it’s good to see you, and you might try to de-intensify the smile that you’re really feeling.

And in other cases you might try to mask your emotion. So you might have contempt for someone at work and you might see them and you don’t want them to know that you don’t like them, and so you might try to mask your expression of contempt with a smile. And that might be a way of trying to hide this feeling. And in other cases you might try to neutralize your expression, where you don’t want to express anything. And so this might be the case when you’re playing Texas Hold’em and you get some pocket aces and you don’t want everybody at the table to know this. And so you try to remain sort of stone-faced, not revealing anything about whether you’re happy or upset by the cards that you’ve been dealt.

Now unfortunately we don’t have perfect control over this. As I said before, we often betray ourselves. So our expressions can sometimes reveal how we’re really feeling, even though we’re trying to regulate them. So we can have false expressions and they might differ in subtle ways from authentic expressions of emotions and other people might be able to pick up on this. So what are some ways that are false emotional expressions can differ from authentic ones?

Now, one way is what’s called morphology and this has to do with the form of the expression and so a well-known example of this is the difference between a fake smile and an authentic smile. And so if I have a fake smile, you know, it’s generally focused on just this motion with my mouth. But an authentic smile is going to include some muscles around the eyes and so the key to trying to recognize a genuine smile is to look for crinkling around the eyes. Now I can it hard for me now to make sure I do a truly authentic smile because I’m, you know, trying to do it on command which is difficult but if you look at somebody who’s smiling versus somebody who’s faking it you can look at the area around the eyes and that can give you a clue whether or not a smile is genuine. So that would be looking at the morphology of the expression.

You can also look for symmetry. When people fake expressions they tend to fake them in more symmetrical ways than authentic expressions. Authentic expressions tend to be slightly asymmetrical. So you might not smile exactly the same way on each side of your mouth when it’s authentic but a fake smile you might do that because you’re just making the same motion on each side. And another clue to a false expression is in the duration. So most emotional expressions last for only about half a second to a few seconds so, you know, if you see somebody and you have an authentic smile in response to them, it’s going to be fairly short. Now this, of course, you already know because you’ve seen, you know, beauty pageants and things like this where people have this plastered smile on their face that’s lasting for like four minutes at a time, you know? Or somebody who’s on the red carpet in Hollywood, you know, and there’s cameras flashing all around them and they’re just smiling the whole time. Of course you know this duration doesn’t seem natural, right? Nobody actually smiles that way for a very long period of time.

And lastly we can think about what’s called temporal patterning. And so this is the idea that the way that emotions show themselves on our face, the pattern in terms of time, is that they sort of gradually appear and then fade away, right? And so you’ve probably seen somebody give you a false smile before that just sort of jerked it onto their face a little bit too quickly, right? You know, you’re walking down the hall and you see somebody, you know, they’d do something like that. It’s probably not an authentic smile and that’s because you’re noticing that the temporal patterning doesn’t seem quite right.

Ok, now this idea of thinking about when people are expressing emotions authentically, or when they’re maybe masking or intensifying, or trying to neutralize things, brings us to trying to figure out what people are up to. And that brings us to the idea of lie detection. So how can we tell when people are lying? Now, noticing false facial expressions might be one clue and it’s important to know here that most people are not very good at lie detection but they think that they are. So if you ask most people “how well do you think you can tell if somebody’s lying?” “Oh yeah, I’m pretty good. I can usually tell somebody’s lying”. But most people are actually not much better than chance. But trained observers can be better. They’re still not perfectly accurate but they can be accurate around 80% of the time. So what’s the difference? What are these trained observers looking for that most people don’t know to look for? So what do they look for?

Well one thing they notice is that despite popular beliefs, liars tend to talk more slowly. So many people think that “oh if somebody’s talking really quickly, you can tell that they’re lying”. That’s not actually the case. Usually people who are lying talk more slowly because they’re thinking more about what they’re saying and they generally include less detail in their descriptions, right? They focus on sort of the big picture ideas and they don’t include minor details and people who are telling the truth are more likely to include these smaller details.

Now, when people are telling the truth one thing that they tend to do is they tend to be more fluent. They, they talk more easily and they do tend to describe things more quickly but they also include imperfections. They include superfluous details. They include things that aren’t relevant. They say “oh, and you know…”, and you’ve of course experienced this if somebody’s telling you a story. Often times they include things that you don’t really know – you don’t really need to know in order to understand the story. But the person just includes them anyway, right? These are superfluous details.

But when people are telling the truth they tend to include these more often and they also tend to show self-doubt and they make what are called “spontaneous corrections” more often. So people who are telling the truth might say “yeah, you know, he was wearing a blue shirt. Or actually, you know, I think it was actually it was a green shirt”. You know, they’ll express some doubt where “I don’t know exactly what time it was, I think it was around was around 4:15, maybe it was five o’clock. I don’t really know. It was sometime around that”. People will show some doubt in their recollections whereas when people are lying, they tend not to show as much doubt. “Oh yeah, it was, it was 4:15”. And they’re giving this sort of confidence that maybe isn’t justified and so that’s one of the ways you can tell that somebody might be lying. And these spontaneous corrections, as I said, that’s, you know, they say “oh he was wearing blue, oh actually it was green” or “I got there it was four o’clock, no it was three o’clock” and they’ll do that sort of automatically, without thinking about it much. Whereas when people are lying they get sort of apprehensive that if they express doubt or if they correct themselves, that people will think “oh, they figured out that I’m lying”. And it’s kind of ironic because the fact that they don’t make these self corrections and they don’t express doubt is actually an indication that they are lying. So you can actually figure it out based on the thing that they’re not doing that would be more natural.

Ok, so the idea of lie detection lastly brings us to polygraphs. So a polygraph or a “lie detector” comes from the Greek “poly” and “graph” or “many” “writings”, because it records a number of physiological changes in the body and it tries to represent these graphically in a way that we can compare. Here’s something where we know they’re telling the truth, you know, saying where they live, their name, things like this. And then we compare that to when we think they might be lying and we see if there are physiological changes. And so we look at things like heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, right, which is the change in the conductance of the skin. And this can potentially indicate changes in physiological activity that means somebody might be lying.

Now we say it’s a “lie detector”; that’s really not a good name for it. We should really refer to these as physiological change detectors. Because it says that’s all that they’re able to detect. They’re not able to detect if somebody is lying or not and they can certainly be fooled. In fact, if you don’t really believe in lie detectors you’ll have a better chance of fooling them. If you recognize “it’s just physiological activity, it’s not some magical way to tell if I’m lying”, then you’ll have a better chance of fooling a lie detector. And it’s also true that lie detectors can show false positives. You could be telling the truth and for some other reason you have some physiological changes in your body. And that might seem to indicate that you’re lying, even though you actually aren’t. So it’s true that polygraphs are better than chance in terms of determining if somebody’s lying or not, but they’re not perfect and they’re actually not much better than chance. Alright, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!