New Research into Facial Expressions and Deception on People Who are Pleading

Now, the articles been going around the deception community very fast and I thought I'd put it into the Blog and into the Site. What is it? Well, researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that there are, from their abstract, two new ways to identify the liar. The deceptive pleader who could for example be pleading for their child's life, shows less contraction of the "grief "muscles (corrugator supercilii, depressor anguli oris) while an honest person would display full to maximum contraction. The other finding was that deceivers also have masking smiles (slight contraction of the zygomatic major) and attempt to appear sad using their eyebrows (full contraction of frontalis).

This is a well detailed anatomy of the face, but as you can see, there are arrows. I have gone and place the two findings on here with their corresponding muscle. Green is for the masking of joy and the display of sadness and the red arrows and lining are for the pleading deceivers. The corresponding action units have also been placed inside.

One frame was 1/30 of a second and the results are showed in the graph below that I have made for you. GP means genuine pleader while DP means deceptive pleader. M and SD are the mean and standard deviations respectively. The more the SD is offset by the M, that means the data isn't as reliable. BTW: SD can be learned usually in senior high school through a statistics or data management course for you young lads.

Now, they have some other results, but this I've already explained in the beginning, so don't worry about Table 2, as they have titled it. It's here so you can look, see the numbers, and go "Yeah I think I can understand that?" If you can't and you're saying you can, read the previous post as I talked a bit about self-deception and emotional connections. If you understand it, great, if you don't its up top somewhere.

Works Cited

ten Brinke, L., Porter, S., & Baker, A. (2012). Darwin the detective: Observable facial muscle contractions reveal emotional high-stakes lies. Evolution and Human Behavior, In press.