Want to Know When Someone is Lying to You?

Source: http://synergology.wordpress.com/facial-muscles/

Want to know whether someone is lying to you? Just look at the person’s eyebrows and lips, they can give you the answer, scientists say. (April ’12)

A team from the University of British Columbia in Canada claimed to have identified four facial muscles that can “leak” a person’s true feelings like guilt, amid intense emotional pressures.

While liars were betrayed by tiny movements that caused them to raise their eyebrows in surprised expressions and smile slightly, innocent people tended to furrow their brow in genuine “expressions of distress”, the researchers found.

A person’s lack of control over their facial expressions meant genuine feelings could be differentiated from fake emotion, they said. Most humans, according to them, can control lower face muscles to talk or eat but those in the upper face are difficult to manipulate and can spark involuntary behaviour.

“Our research suggests that muscles of the face are not under complete conscious control and certain muscles are likely to betray the liar, particularly in high-stakes and highly emotional situations,” Dr Leanne ten Brinke, who led the study, told The Daily Telegraph.  ”Facial cues are an important, but often ignored, aspect of credibility assessments where an emotional issue is in question,” she said.  ”Cues to emotional deception are likely to occur when the underlying emotion a liar is attempting to mask, is relatively strong.”

In the study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour ( april ’12), the researchers analysed facial expressions of a group of people — half of whom were later proved to be lying — as they made emotional televised pleas for the safe return of a missing relative.  They found that deceptive pleaders raised their forehead muscles, called the frontalis, which gave off surprised expressions.

Liars also had increased activity of the “zygomatic majormuscles”, located around the mouth, which caused them to inadvertently lift their lips into a smile, found the team that also viewed over 23,000 frames of video from real-life cases in Britain, America, Canada and Australia.

Dr ten Brinke, from the university’s Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law (CAPSL), said the study found muscles “leaked” signs of true emotion because of the person’s subconscious actions.

This compared to “genuine pleaders”, who activated their inner frontalis and “corrugator supercilli”, located between the eyebrows, which caused them to frown and furrow their brow in a genuine “an expression of distress. While genuine pleaders show real distress on their face, the deceptive pleaders are unable to replicate that same activation,” Dr ten Brinke said. While the findings were important for “lie catchers”, she cautioned they did not provide a “Pinocchio’s nose”.

“Not everyone will leak their true emotions, and some people are better than others at adopting a false face (such as) psychopaths,” she added.

The Emotion Found in Social Data

By Paul Dunay, gyro
Source: http://www.rockmelt.com/s/forbes.com/70aaaca40650983c5207f225f906d4d6?fb_action_ids=10150803937943477&fb_action_types=news.reads&fb_source=other_multiline

Let’s be clear: Most people don’t use social media just for the sake of it. Some might, but the vast majority of people who share content, post comments or offer sentiments and opinions online do so because they are emotionally invested in the product, service or experience about which they are opining, or what Andrew Jeavons of Survey Analytics calls “the point of emotion.”

As Jeavons points out, most feedback is conducted via traditional methods that suffer from huge structural deficits.

1.  Surveys break down for four reasons: They are episodic, have limited sample sizes, the answers are effected by the way the questions are posed, and because they rely on the concept of “recall.” And recall is imperfect because it asks a person to offer information on a past event outside of the context and situation in which he or she experienced it.
2.  Focus groups are skewed in three ways: small sample sizes, self-selection population and the dreaded “decibel rule,” which means the loudest person in the room wins. Results of focus groups are not real time or data driven, and they don’t parse their findings with the objective use of technology.

It appears to us that companies that make million-dollar decisions on this kind of “static” data are doing themselves a disservice. We believe they should be using more authentic and real-time data in order to make data-driven decisions.

That is exactly why social media is so special and different. Because of it, people have become “micro-authors” when and where it matters. Instead of a laborious production process, social media reduces the distance between the production and consumption of opinions; in fact, it obliterates it.

In some contexts, emotions are considered bad. But if you truly want to know what consumers really think and want to be able to predict how they might behave, find them at the point of emotion. Very likely that means you’ll find them on the various social media platforms. And, once you do, you need real-time data, gathered and interpreted by smart technology, and then put into practice by a team who now understands your customers’ real attitudes and interests.

The opportunity is yours for the taking! Start actively listening and engaging with your consumers now on these platforms, because silence and passivity are fatal in today’s new media world.

Paul Dunay is an award-winning B-to-B marketing expert with more than 20 years’ success in generating demand and creating buzz for leading technology, consumer products, financial services and professional services organizations. Dunay is the CMO of Networked Insights, a leader in social media analytics, and author of five “Dummies” books: “Facebook Marketing for Dummies” (Wiley 2009, 2011, 2012).

Follow him @PaulDunay