David Matsumoto Poker
David Matsumoto Poker Club

By David Matsumoto and Hyi Sung Hwang

David Matsumoto, is Professor of Psychology at San Francisco State University and Director of Humintell, LLC. He has studied culture, nonverbal behavior, and emotion for over 30 years and has published over 120 journal articles in peer-reviewed, scientific journals. His books include Culture and Psychology, the Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology, and Cross-Cultural Research Methods in Psychology. He is the recipient of many awards and honors in the field of psychology, including being named a G. Stanley Hall lecturer by the American Psychological Association. He is the series editor for Cambridge University Press’ series on Culture and Psychology and is Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.

David Matsumoto, Seung Hee Yoo, and Satoko Hirayama San Francisco State University Galina Petrova Vologda State Pedagogical University As one component of emotion regulation, display rules, which reflect the regulation of expressive behavior, have been the topic of many studies. Despite their theoretical and empirical importance. Total life earnings: $108,844. Latest cash: $33,230 on 29-Feb-2020. Click here to see the details of David Matsumoto's 23 cashes. Poker news brought to you by blondepoker. 21st David Matsumoto (Playa Del Ray, CA) - $20,109 22nd Frank Sinopoli (Hollywood, FL) - $20,109.

Hyi Sung Hwang, is a Research Scientist at Humintell, LLC. Her research interests are in emotion, nonverbal behaviors, and culture. She is an expert at the Facial Action Coding System and in the conduct of research examining facial expressions and other nonverbal behaviors. She is co-creator of many of the training tools used to teach law enforcement officers and many other individuals how to recognize micro and subtle facial expressions of emotion. She is an author of a number of scientific publications and conference presentations in this area and is co-editor, with David Matsumoto and Mark Frank, of an upcoming book entitled Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications.

Emotions are an incredibly important aspect of human life and basic research on emotions of the past few decades has produced several discoveries that have led to important real world applications. In this article we describe two of those discoveries – the universality of facial expressions of emotion and the existence of microexpressions – because of their importance to and novelty in psychology. We discuss how we have taken those discoveries to create programs that teach people how to read facial expressions of emotion, as well as recent research that has validated those training programs and documented their efficacy.

Two Important Scientific Discoveries

The Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Arguably the most important contribution basic science has made to our understanding of emotion concerns the universality of facial expressions of emotion. Darwin (1872) was the first to suggest that they were universal; his ideas about emotions were a centerpiece of his theory of evolution, suggesting that emotions and their expressions were biologically innate and evolutionarily adaptive, and that similarities in them could be seen phylogenetically. Early research testing Darwin’s ideas, however, was inconclusive (Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972), and the dominant perspective in psychology was that facial expressions were culture-specific – that is, just as every culture had its own verbal language, it had its own language of facial expressions. Darwin’s claims were resurrected by Tomkins (1962, 1963), who suggested that emotion was the basis of human motivation and that the seat of emotion was in the face. Tomkins conducted the first study demonstrating that facial expressions were reliably associated with certain emotional states (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964).

Later, Tomkins recruited Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard to conduct what is known today as the “universality studies.” The first of these demonstrated high cross-cultural agreement in judgments of emotions in faces by people in both literate (Ekman, 1972, 1973; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971) and preliterate cultures (Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman, et al., 1969). Then Friesen’s (1972) study documented that the same facial expressions of emotion were produced spontaneously by members of very different cultures in reaction to emotion-eliciting films.

Since the original universality studies more than 30 studies examining judgments of facial expressions have replicated the universal recognition of emotion in the face (reviewed in Matsumoto, 2001). In addition a meta-analysis of 168 datasets examining judgments of emotion in the face and other nonverbal stimuli indicated universal emotion recognition well above chance levels (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002a). And there have been over 75 studies that have demonstrated that these very same facial expressions are produced when emotions are elicited spontaneously (Matsumoto, Keltner, Shiota, Frank, & O'Sullivan, 2008). These findings are impressive given that they have been produced by different researchers around the world in different laboratories using different methodologies with participants from many different cultures but all converging on the same set of results. Thus there is strong evidence for the universal facial expressions of seven emotions – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Seven Basic Emotions and their Universal Expressions.

Other bodies of evidence provide support for the biological and genetic sources of facial expressions of emotion. For example, when emotions are spontaneously aroused even congenitally blind individuals produce the same facial expressions as sighted individuals do (Cole, Jenkins, & Shott, 1989; Galati, Miceli, & Sini, 2001; Galati, Sini, Schmidt, & Tinti, 2003; Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009). Facial behaviors of blind individuals are more concordant with kin than with strangers (Peleg et al., 2006), and some facial expressions to emotionally-provocative stimuli are more concordant among monozygotic twin pairs than dizygotic twins (Kendler et al., 2008). The same facial musculature that exists in adult humans exists in newborn infants and is fully functional at birth (Ekman & Oster, 1979). That same facial musculature that humans use for emotion signaling is also present in chimpanzees (Bard, 2003; Burrows, Waller, Parr, & Bonar, 2006), and the facial expressions considered to be universal among humans have been observed in nonhuman primates (de Waal, 2003).

Microexpressions

A second important discovery concerns the existence of microexpressions. When single emotions occur and there is no reason for them to be modified or concealed, expressions typically last between 0.5 to 4 seconds and involve the entire face (Ekman, 2003). We call these macroexpressions; they occur whenever we are alone or with family and close friends. Macroexpressions are relatively easy to see if one knows what to look for. Microexpressions, however, are expressions that go on and off the face in a fraction of a second, sometimes as fast as 1/30 of a second. They are so fast that if you blink you would miss them.

Microexpressions are likely signs of concealed emotions. (They may also be signs of rapidly processed but unconcealed emotional states.) They occur so fast that most people cannot see or recognize them in real time. The idea that microexpressions exist has its roots in Darwin’s (1872) inhibition hypothesis that suggested that facial actions that cannot be controlled voluntarily may be produced involuntarily even if the individual is trying to control his or her expressions. Research on the neuroanatomical bases of emotional expressions suggests how this occurs. There are two neural pathways that mediate facial expressions, each originating in a different area of the brain (Rinn, 1984). The pyramidal tract drives voluntary facial actions and originates in the cortical motor strip, whereas the extrapyramidal tract drives involuntary emotional expressions and originates in subcortical areas of the brain. When individuals are in intensely emotional situations but need to control their expressions they activate both systems, which engage in a neural “tug of war” over control of the face, allowing for the quick, fleeting leakage of microexpressions.

The existence of microexpressions was verified almost a century after Darwin by Haggard & Isaacs (1966) while scanning films of psychotherapy sess

David Matsumoto Poker