Abstract
Microexpressions are extremely quick facial expressions of emotion that appear on the face for less than ½ a s. To date, no study has demonstrated that the ability to read them can be trained. We present two studies that do so, as well as evidence for the retention of the training effects. In Study 1 department store employees were randomly assigned to a training or comparison group. The training group had significantly higher scores than the comparison group in microexpression reading accuracy at the end of the training; 2 weeks later the training group had better third-party ratings of social and communicative skills on the job. Study 2 demonstrated that individuals trained in reading microexpressions retained their ability to read them better than a comparison group tested 2–3 weeks after initial training. These results indicated that the ability to read microexpressions can be trained and are retained.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This idea may actually have earlier roots in the work of Duchenne (1862/1990), who demonstrated a difference in specific facial muscles between smiles of true enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles. Darwin’s inhibition hypothesis was different in that it suggested that suppressed emotional expressions could leak out involuntarily.
Relatedly, Condon and Ogston (1967) published a microanalysis of interactional behavior. While not focused on facial expressions they employed a micro-level, frame-by-frame analysis of nonverbal behavior in a psychotherapeutic interview of a mother, father, and child. They suggested that nonverbal behavior can be analyzed with such precision and that such micro-level nonverbal behaviors signal something meaningful about the mental states of the encoders.
To our knowledge Porter and ten Brinke’s (2008) study was the first empirical study published in a peer-reviewed journal that demonstrated the existence of microexpressions, as previous evidence for microexpressions were limited to book chapters and books. Many peer-reviewed articles on expression in deceptive situations do exist (e.g., Ekman et al. 1981; Frank and Ekman 1993) but these focus on the form of the expressions—i.e., the presence or absence of specific facial muscles, ala Duchenne’s (1862/1990) work mentioned earlier—and not on their speed of occurrence (microexpressions).
This claim is consistent with the theoretical and empirical work on microexpressions to date. It may be that microexpressions are also signs of rapidly processed but unconcealed emotional states. Future research will need to investigate this and other possibilities.
Even though the third-party raters were initially blind to condition of the individuals, it was very possible that they might not have been blind to condition at the time of the ratings. Participants may have communicated with each other and their raters about their training/conditions.
Unfortunately, the number of participants who had more than one rater was too small to conduct any meaningful analyses.
The analyses reported here utilized only those participants with complete data (N = 72).
It may be the case that these findings occurred because of Hawthorne or halo effects. On one hand, that positive effects were found on some scales but not others may argue against Hawthorne or halo in confounding the findings because it would be difficult to argue that such effects occurred differentially on some scales but not others. And the two non-significant effects did not occur because of low reliabilities among the dependent variables. On the other hand, all four variables showed the same group effect in the same direction, and it could be argued that the effect just happened to be larger for two variables, pushing them past statistical significance. The results should be interpreted with this caveat.
All analyses reported in this section and the next were recomputed using only participants with complete data; all findings were replicated. Detailed report of the analyses is available from the authors.
References
Ambady, N., Hallahan, M., & Rosenthal, R. (1995). On judging and being judged accurately in zero-acquaintance situations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(3), 518–529.
Barnhill, G. P., Cook, K. T., Tebbenkamp, K., & Myles, B. S. (2002). The effectiveness of social skills intervention targetting nonverbal communication for adolescents with Asperger syndrome and related pervasive developmental delays. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 17(2), 112–118.
Baron, R. M., & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(6), 1173–1882.
Blanck, P. D., Rosenthal, R., Snodgrass, S. E., DePaulo, B. M., & Zuckerman, M. (1981). Sex differences in eavesdropping on nonverbal cues: Developmental changes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(2), 391–396.
Bolte, S., Hubl, D., Feineis-Matthews, S., Prvulovic, D., Dierks, T., & Poustka, F. (2006). Facial affect recognition training in autism: Can we animate the fusiform gyrus? Behavioral Neuroscience, 120(1), 211–216.
Carton, J. S., Kessler, E. A., & Pape, C. L. (1999). Nonverbal decoding skills and relationship well-being in adults. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 23, 91–100.
Condon, W. S., & Ogston, W. D. (1967). A segmentation of behavior. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 5, 221–235.
Costanzo, M., & Archer, D. (1989). Interpreting the expressive behavior of others: The Interpersonal Perception Task. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 13(4), 225–245.
Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of emotion in man and animals. New York: Oxford University Press.
DePaulo, B. M., & Rosenthal, R. (1979). The structure of nonverbal decoding skills. Journal of Personality, 47(3), 506–517.
Duchenne de Boulogne, G. B. (1862/1990). The mechanism of human facial expression. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ekman, P. (1985). Telling lies: clues to deceit in the marketplace, politics, and marriage (1st ed. ed.). New York: Norton.
Ekman, P. (1993). Facial expression and emotion. American Psychologist, 48(4), 384–392.
Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions revealed (2nd ed. ed.). New York: Times Books.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1974). Nonverbal behavior and psychopathology. In R. J. Friedman & M. Katz (Eds.), The psychology of depression: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 3–31). Washington, D. C.: Winston and Sons.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face: A guide to recognizing the emotions from facial cues. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1978). Facial action coding system: Investigator’s guide. Palo Alto, Calif.: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Ekman, P., Hager, J., & Friesen, W. V. (1981). The symmetry of emotional and deliberate facial actions. Psychophysiology, 18, 101–106.
Elfenbein, H. A. (2006). Learning in emotion judgments: Training and the cross-cultural understanding of facial expressions. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 30(1), 21–36.
Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2002). Predicting workplace outcomes from the ability to eavesdrop on feelings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(5), 963–971.
Elfenbein, H. A., Foo, M. D., White, J., Tan, H. H., & Aik, V. C. (2007). Reading your counterpart: The benefit of emotion recognition accuracy for effectiveness in negotiation. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 31, 205–223.
Frank, M. G., & Ekman, P. (1993). Not all smiles are created equal: The differences between enjoyment and nonenjoyment smiles. Special Issue: Current issues in psychological humor research. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 6(1), 9–26.
Frank, M. G., & Ekman, P. (1997). The ability to detect deceit generalizes across different types of high-stake lies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1429–1439.
Frank, M. G., & Stennett, J. (2001). The forced-choice paradigm and the perception of facial expressions of emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(1), 75–85.
Frommann, N., Streit, M., & Wolwer, W. (2003). Remediation of facial affect recognition impairments in patients with schizophrenia: A new training program. Psychiatry Research, 117(3), 281–284.
Garwood, R., Guiora, A. Z., & Kalter, N. (1970). Manifest anxiety and perception of microomentary expression. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 11(6), 576–580.
Guercio, J. M., Podolska-Schroeder, H., & Rehfeldt, R. A. (2004). Using stimulus equivalence technology to teach emotion recognition to adults with acquired brain injury. Brain Injury, 18(6), 593–601.
Guilford, J. P. (1929). An experiment in learning to read facial expression. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 24(2), 191–202.
Haggard, E. A., & Isaacs, K. S. (1966). Micro-momentary facial expressions as indicators of ego mechanisms in psychotherapy. In L. A. Gottschalk & A. H. Auerbach (Eds.), Methods of Research in Psychotherapy (pp. 154–165). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Kirkpatrick, D. L. (1998). Evaluating training programs the four levels Available from http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/cul/resolve?clio4245080.
Matsumoto, D., & Hwang, H. S. (2011). Judgment of Profile Views of Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion. Manuscript currently submitted for publication.
Matsumoto, D., Keltner, D., Shiota, M. N., Frank, M. G., & O’Sullivan, M. (2008). What’s in a face? Facial expressions as signals of discrete emotions. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland, & L. Feldman Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 211–234). New York: Guilford Press.
Matsumoto, D., LeRoux, J. A., Wilson-Cohn, C., Raroque, J., Kooken, K., Ekman, P., et al. (2000). A new test to measure emotion recognition ability: Matsumoto and Ekman’s Japanese and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition Test (JACBART). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 24(3), 179–209.
McAlpine, C., Kendall, K. A., & Singh, N. N. (1991). Recognition of facial expressions of emtoion by persons with mental retardation. American Journal of Mental Retardation, 96(1), 29–36.
McAlpine, C., Singh, N. N., Ellis, C. R., & Kendall, K. A. (1992a). Enhancing the ability of adults with mental retardation to recognize facial expressions of emotion. Behavior Modification, 16(4), 559–573.
McAlpine, C., Singh, N. N., Kendall, K. A., & Ellis, C. R. (1992b). Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by persons with mental retardation: A matched comparison study. Behavior Modification, 16(4), 543–558.
McKenzie, K., Matheson, E., McKaskie, K., Hamilton, L., & Murray, G. C. (2000). Impact of group training on emotion recognition in individuals with a learning disability. British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 28(4), 143–147.
Nowicki, S. J., & Duke, M. P. (1994). Individual differences in the nonverbal communication of affect: The diagnostic anlaysis of nonverbal accuracy scale. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 19, 9–35.
Porter, S., & ten Brinke, L. (2008). Reading between the lies: Identifying concealed and falsified emotions in universal facial expressions. Psychological Science, 19(5), 508–514.
Rinn, W. E. (1984). The neuropsychology of facial expression: A review of the neurological and psychological mechanisms for producing facial expressions. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 52–77.
Rosenthal, R., & DePaulo, B. M. (1979). Sex differences in eavesdropping on nonverbal cues. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(2), 273–285.
Rosenthal, R., Hall, J. A., DiMatteo, M. R., Rogers, P. L., & Archer, D. (1979). Sensitivity to nonverbal communication: The PONS Test. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Silver, H., Goodman, C., Knoll, G., & Isakov, V. (2004). Brief emotion training improves recognition of facial emotions in chronic schizophrenia: A pilot study. Psychiatry Research, 128(2), 147–154.
Solomon, M., Goodlin-Jones, B. L., & Anders, T. F. (2004). A social adjustment enhancement intervention for high functioning autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and Pervasive Development Disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(6), 649–668.
Stewart, C. A., & Singh, N. N. (1995). Enhancing the recognition and production of facial expressions of emotion by children with mental retardation. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 16(5), 365–382.
Taylor, L. L., Guiora, A. Z., Catford, J. C., & Lane, H. L. (1969). The role of personality variables in second language behavior. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 10(6), 463–474.
Warren, G., Schertler, E., & Bull, P. (2009). Detecting deception from emotional and unemotional cues. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33, 59–69.
Wolwer, W., Frommann, N., Halfmann, S., Piaszek, A., Streit, M., & Gaebel, W. (2005). Remediation of impairments in facial affect recognition in schizophrenia: Efficacy and specificity of a new training program. Schizophrenia Research, 80(2–3), 295–303.
Yoo, S. H., Matsumoto, D., & LeRoux, J. A. (2006). Emotion regulation, emotion recognition, and intercultural adjustment. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 30(3), 345–363.
Acknowledgments
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. We thank Gil-Won Hwang and the Sopooong Department Store in South Korea for their assistance in the project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Appendix
Questionnaire used by colleagues for third-party ratings in study 1
How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement about the behavior of the target individual? Please indicate your rate of agreement and mark your answer on your answer sheet
-
1
Strongly Disagree.
-
2
Disagree.
-
3
Agree.
-
4
Strongly Agree.
Social skills
-
1.
Breakthrough current situation and promote new ideas even when experiencing gridlock or resistance.
-
2.
Often attracting and leading people.
-
3.
Always pursuing challenging goals and making the effort towards accomplishing those goals.
-
4.
Set high self-motivation standard to accomplish tasks.
-
5.
Promote change by engaging others when many are not willing to change
-
6.
Good at getting people involved.
-
7.
Recruiting people to initiate action even when others had given up.
-
8.
Possess human network in a wide range of departments.
-
9.
Indicate clear vision even in a confusing situation.
-
10.
Proactively detect risks and lead others even when problems are not exposed at the surface.
Communication skills
-
1.
Understand the flow of conversation from the positioning of the person.
-
2.
Take time to listen to others without interrupting.
-
3.
Accept others’ opinions if they are right although having his/her own opinions.
-
4.
Never behave in a manner that may provide unpleasant feelings to others regardless of how difficult the situation becomes.
-
5.
Handle severe criticism by others without expressing anger.
-
6.
Listen to others even when busy and pressured.
-
7.
Listen to others, placing him/herself in the other person’s position.
-
8.
Act with respect towards others although being in a position of authority.
-
9.
Listen to others with positive gestures.
-
10.
Does not hold on to the past success.
NB: These items were randomized in a single questionnaire.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Matsumoto, D., Hwang, H.S. Evidence for training the ability to read microexpressions of emotion. Motiv Emot 35, 181–191 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9212-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-011-9212-2