Tell us about your applied work in training programs.ĭavid Matsumoto: Well, learning to read microexpressions and nonverbal behaviors in general can be very valuable for anyone whose job it is to understand other people’s true feelings, their thoughts, their motivations, their personalities or their intentions. They see something that has changed on the face, but they don’t know exactly what is was that was changed.ĭavid Matsumoto: It’s very fleeting, but if you take a freeze frame on it on a video, you’ll see that a lot of times there’s a big facial expression that is very clear about what the person’s mental state is.Īudrey Hamilton: It all sounds very interesting, but how is this useful in the real world? You work with numerous organizations like I mentioned – the FBI, the TSA – to help train interrogators and business people in the skill of reading people. Some people do see them but they don’t know what they’re seeing. But because they’re extremely quick and because they’re unconscious, when they occur, they occur often times less than half a second – sometimes as fast as one-tenth of a second or even one-fifteenth of a second. And sometimes they’re partial and very subtle expressions of emotion. Is that right?ĭavid Matsumoto: Microexpressions are unconscious, extremely quick, sometimes full-face expressions of an emotion. Can you give examples of some of the less obvious facial expressions? I think you call them microexpressions, you know where someone is maybe attempting to conceal his or her emotions. Matsumoto.ĭavid Matsumoto: Thank you for having me.Īudrey Hamilton: We’re probably all familiar with the universal facial expressions of our emotions – you know, anger, joy, sadness – you know, those are some of them.

An expert on facial expressions, nonverbal behavior and deception, he is director of Humintell, a company that conducts research and training for organizations such as the Transportation Security Administration, the FBI and the U.S. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is “Speaking of Psychology.”ĭavid Matsumoto is a professor of psychology and director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory at San Francisco State University. Why do people’s faces change when they’re angry or sad? In this episode, we speak with a psychologist and expert in facial expression, gestures and other nonverbal behavior about how not speaking can speak volumes. Audrey Hamilton: A fleeting change in someone’s face or body language can signal a lot of different emotions.

Body language psychology