1. Expressed Emotion Detecting Emotion
Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior
Culture and Emotional Expression
The Effects of Facial Expressions

2. First, my favorite emotional scene… 
The Man Punted Baxter (Watch at home: )

3. Expressed Emotion
Emotions are expressed on the face, by the body, and by the intonation of voice. Is this nonverbal language of emotion universal?
Preview Question 5: How do we communicate nonverbally?
Watch a baby demonstrate a perfect expression of disgust when eating a grapefruit:
Watch another baby express fear/happiness at mom blowing her nose!

4. These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty: Emotion as Expressed Through Intonation of Voice
Watch the following clips from Seinfeld:
1. Pretzels (Watch at home:
2. These pretzels are making me thirsty (Watch at home:
Choose an emotion off of your emotions list. With a partner, sit back to back (so you can’t see each other’s faces) and express that emotion as much as possible while only saying “These pretzels are making me thirsty.” Can your partner guess what emotion you’re conveying just from the tone of your voice?

5. Emotion as Expressed Through the Face and Body
Most of us are good at deciphering emotions through nonverbal communication. In a crowd of faces a single angry face will “pop out” faster than a single happy face (Fox et al, 2000).

6. Experience Influences How We Perceive Emotion
Viewing the morphed middle face, evenly mixing fear with anger, physically abused children were more likely than non-abused children to perceive the face as angry.
Figure Experience influences how we perceive emotions Myers: Psychology, Ninth Edition Copyright © 2010 by Worth Publishers

7. Experts at Detecting Emotion – Paul Ekman
This guy is awesome.
Ekman is a psychologist famous for his studies in human emotion, particularly analyzing the facial expressions that accompany emotions. According to his official website, “Currently, he is the Manager of the Paul Ekman Group, LLC (PEG), a small company that produces training devices relevant to emotional skills, and is initiating new research relevant to national security and law enforcement.” He is also a professor at the University of California.
Go to his website and learn a little bit about him. Make sure you watch the videos on the bottom of the page:

8. Lie To Me
The character of Dr. Cal Lightman on the FOX TV show Lie To Me is based on Paul Ekman and his work: (or
Watch episodes of Lie to Me on Netflix, if you have it!

9. Detecting Emotion
Hard-to-control facial muscles reveal signs of emotions you may be trying to conceal. A feigned smile may continue for more than 4-5 seconds while a genuine smile will have faded by then.
Try it yourself!
“Spot the Fake Smile”:
Dr. Paul Elkman, University of California at San Francisco
How good are you at reading people’s emotions? Try a quiz here:
Which of Paul Ekman’s smiles is genuine?

10. How Can We Apply Ekman’s Work in the Real World?
Read Ekman’s commentary and watch linked video: Live, from New York! The F-Word! (Watch at home: )
Was Kanye’s apology to Taylor Swift real?
“You Lie!” event with microexpressions:
Deciphering the Body Language of Politics (Watch at home:
Great interview with Ekman on New Zealand’s version of 60 Minutes
Paul Ekman_Why We Lie Watch at home:

11. Detecting Emotion Test
Lie Detection
Ekman and O’Sullivan on detecting lies:
Some students watched nature films while others watched a gruesome film
All of the students were asked to talk about the movie as if they were watching a nature film (in other words, they were to lie).
They found that people are not very good lie detectors. They tested students, psychiatrists, judges and police officers. They all performed at the level of chance. Only Secret Service Agents performed better (80% accuracy).
In a follow-up study, Ekman found that Government Agents (CIA), trained psychologists and specially trained street smart interrogators from LA were able to detect liars.
How good are you? Try the Detecting Emotions Test below and Handout 12-9 with a partner.
Detecting Emotion Test

12. Do Lie Detectors Work?
Remember that our physiological arousal is much the same from one emotion to another – anxiety, irritation, and guilt all prompt similar physiological activity.
Had the polygraph experts been the judges in the cases to the left, more than 1/3 of the innocent would have been declared guilty and almost ¼ of the guilty would have been declared innocent. 12

13. EEG Recordings
EEG recordings prove to be a bit more reliable, because recent studies show that liars’ brains light up in places that honest people’s brains do not (left frontal lobe and anterior cingulate cortex).
Figure Liar, liar, brain’s on fire Myers: Psychology, Ninth Edition Copyright © 2010 by Worth Publishers

14. What makes someone a leader?
According to some studies, it might be the ability to lie successfully!
“Researchers find the best leaders of children and men are also the best liars. But it's not clear what makes a good leader among adult women.”
Watch “The Power of Persuasion” at (Episode 1, 31:00-43:00)

15. Hmm… what do you think? 
John Edwards (
Richard Nixon (
Bill Clinton (
A-Rod (

16. Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior
How emotionally expressive are you? Use Handout 12-7 to find out.

17. Emotions are Adaptive
Darwin speculated that our ancestors communicated with facial expressions in the absence of language. Nonverbal facial expressions led to our ancestors’ survival – they served an adaptive purpose. It was probably important to our survival to read the emotions of others. We would want to stay away from angry people and move closer to people who are attracted to us.
Charles Darwin ( )

18. Women vs. Men
Was there a gender difference in our emotional expressivity results from Handout 12-7?
Coats and Feldman demonstrated that women are more expressive of their emotions.
When shown sad, happy, and scary film clips, women expressed more emotions than men.
Figure Gender and expressiveness Myers: Psychology, Ninth Edition Copyright © 2010 by Worth Publishers

19. Gender and Nonverbal Communication
In a study by Rosenthal and Hall they showed film clips of an emotionally expressive woman. They found that some people are better at reading emotions in others.
They found introverts tend read others better while extroverts are easier to read.
Women are much better at discerning nonverbal emotions than men.
Women’s nonverbal sensitivity gives them an edge in spotting lies.
Surveys reveal that women are much more empathetic than males; however, when monitored electronically, the gap between men and women is much smaller.

20. Culture and Emotional Expression
Not all nonverbal communication is universal. Try Exercise 13.1, Tourist Trap: Pattern Recognition
Facial expressions, however, are different...

21. The Universality of Emotional Expression
The Ekman and Friesen study on emotional expression studied people from around the world and their ability to identify emotions through facial expressions across cultures. They found that this ability seemed to transcend culture, meaning that facial expressions are likely biological (nature), not cultural (nurture).
In the 1970’s, Ekman devised a list of basic emotions from cross-cultural research on the Fore tribesmen of Papua New Guinea. These tribesmen were one of the few cultures left that had no contact with any other culture. They had never seen a newspaper, television, even themselves in a mirror. He found that they could reliably identify the expressions of emotion in photographs of people from cultures with which they were not familiar. They could also ascribe facial expressions to descriptions of situations.
The 6 basic universal emotions Ekman identified were anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. He later expanded this list to a total of 11.

22. Figure 10.22: Cross-cultural comparisons of people’s ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.
Ekman and Friesen (1975) found that people in highly disparate cultures showed fair agreement on the emotions portrayed in these photos. This consensus across cultures suggests that facial expressions of emotions may be universal and that they have a strong biological basis. Source: Data from Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. © 1975 by Paul Ekman, photographs courtesy of Paul Ekman.
Figure 10.22: Cross-cultural comparisons of people’s ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.
Ekman and Friesen (1975) found that people in highly disparate cultures showed fair agreement on the emotions portrayed in these photos. This consensus across cultures suggests that facial expressions of emotions may be universal and that they have a strong biological basis. Source: Data from Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. © 1975 by Paul Ekman, photographs courtesy of Paul Ekman.

23. By the way… BEST. IDEA. EVER.
For Fun…
“Nightmare Fear Factory” started posting pictures of its haunted house guests online for everyone to view ( . Not only are they hilarious to look at, but you will see what Ekman means about the universality of human emotion when you see that everyone’s fear reactions are pretty darn similar. A sample:
By the way… BEST. IDEA. EVER.

24. The Universality of Emotional Expression
Another piece of evidence for the inborn nature of emotional expression is another study on blind and deaf children. This study showed that they made the same facial expressions as we all do. This shows the universality of emotional expression because it would have been impossible for them to have learned to express emotions in this way.

25. The Effects of Facial Expressions
Do our facial expressions influence our feelings?

26. The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
A study done by Laird (1974) found that when people are forced to smile they feel happy, when they scowl they feel angry, etc.
Courtesy of Louis Schake/ Michael Kausman/
The New York Times Pictures
If facial expressions are manipulated, like furrowing brows, people feel sad while looking at sad pictures (attaching two golf tees to the face and making their tips touch causes the brow to furrow).

27. Figure 10.21: The facial feedback hypothesis.
According to the facial feedback hypothesis, inputs to subcortical centers automatically evoke facial expressions associated with certain emotions, and the facial muscles then feed signals to the cortex that help it recognize the emotion that one is experiencing. According to this view, facial expressions help create the subjective experience of various emotions.
Figure 10.21: The facial feedback hypothesis.
According to the facial feedback hypothesis, inputs to subcortical centers automatically evoke facial expressions associated with certain emotions, and the facial muscles then feed signals to the cortex that help it recognize the emotion that one is experiencing. According to this view, facial expressions help create the subjective experience of various emotions.

28. The Facial Feedback Theory (cont.)
The facial feedback theory is consistent with the James-Lange theory of emotion. William James suggested, “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.”
Research confirms this by showing that when people have been instructed to mold their faces in ways that mimic expressions of the basic emotions, including happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness, they also experience those emotions.
Try it yourself – just activating the smiling muscles by holding a pen in the teeth (rather than with the lips which activates frowning muscles) is enough to make cartoons seem more amusing!

29. Can Botox Treat Depression?
In a pilot study, Eric Finzi and Erik Wasserman attempted to apply the facial feedback idea to the treatment of depression. They used the popular anti-wrinkle treatment Botox to prevent the act of frowning. Botox was injected into the frown muscles around the forehead and mouths of 10 female participants whose test scores had indicated the presence of clinical depression.
Findings after two months indicated that the treatments had eliminated symptoms of depression in nine of the women and reduced symptoms in the tenth woman.
Kathleen Delano, one of the participants in the study, described the impact of the treatment. She stated, “It wasn’t like I had Botox one night, woke up the next day, and said ‘Hallelujah, I’m cured.’” Rather, over several weeks, she explained that she found herself talking to people more, getting out more often, and smiling more. “I think Botox was the catalyst, the rope someone threw down the dark well I was in. I started doing things like going to the gym, to the movies.”
The limits of the study: it employed a very small sample and followed participants for only a short time. Critics suggest that future research should involve a larger sample that follows people for a longer period. Studies should also employ a control group that receives a placebo treatment. In addition, research should utilize more thorough psychiatric evaluations.

30. Analyzing Emotion
Analysis of emotions are carried on different levels.
Figure Levels of analysis for the study of emotion Myers: Psychology, Ninth Edition Copyright © 2010 by Worth Publishers

31. Good video to review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PFqzYoKkCc
Figure The ingredients of emotion Myers: Psychology, Ninth Edition Copyright © 2010 by Worth Publishers