Speaking of Psychology - Nonverbal communication speaks volumes (SOP34)

Episode Date: February 12, 2016

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. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 expressions, 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 Humintel, a company that conducts research and training for organizations such as the

Transportation Security Administration, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service. Welcome, Dr. Matamato. Thank you for having me. We are 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 micro expressions, you know, where someone is maybe attempting to conceal his or her emotions, these are much harder to detect. Is that right? Micro expressions 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 oftentimes 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 it was that was changed. It's fleeting. 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. 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 and the skill of reading people.

Tell us about your applied work in training programs. 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, and national security, intelligence, and 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 microexperions. 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 salespeople. It could be for the legal profession. It could be for health care professionals. Or, you know, psychotherapists, medical doctors, anybody, salesperson, I think I mentioned salesperson, 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. 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? Well, facial expressions of emotion are universal in the sense that we all, everybody around the world, regardless of race, culture, nationality, sex, gender, et cetera, and 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 there are, of course, there are cultural differences and large individual differences in when people express emotions and how they express them when they feel their 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 very many different types of gestures. And so the two types of gestures that, 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 you know they're 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 you do them and in the form. So if you can picture people waving around, some people in different, 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 illustrators occur are 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 okay 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 an adjustment. 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 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 them that are culture-specific. 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? 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. 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 learn it, 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 is no way that they could possibly learn to see those expressions and put them on their faces from birth, 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 showed 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 cited 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. And so it leads me to think, and many others, to believe that the ability to have facial expressions of emotion is something that we are biologically in Aden that we're all

born with. I've done judo for 48 years of my life here, and I've been fortunate enough to be part of the, 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 regular Olympic Games, so these are all cited individuals. And we studied their expressions right at the moment they won or lost the medal match. Okay.

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 expressions 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, what happens in every Olympics, what happens in every Olympics

is the Paralympics rolls in into town using exactly the same venue. So my guy was there still. And every sport has a different disability for judo, for judo it's blindness. And so all 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 sight of the athletes in the regular Olympic Games, What you find is that for the winners, they all do the same. Winners and losers, they all do the same thing. And 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, in the correspondence between the facial muscle muscle movements was something like 0.9 or some incredibly high number that you never see in research nowadays, so that the correspondence is amazingly high between the blind and the sighted athletes. What's really interesting about sighted athletes, blind athletes is this. If we ask our listeners to show on their faces,

what do you do, what do you think you do on your face when you express anger? Everybody can give you something. And it'll 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 a 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 or something else. 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 it, whereas sighted people do. Interesting. And so this is, to me, 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. Well, thank you, Dr. Matsumoto for joining us today. It's been very interesting. My pleasure.

For more information on Dr. Matsumoto's work and to hear more episodes, please go to our website at speakingofpsychology.org. With the American Psychological Association speaking of psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.