Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Affective Expression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Affective Expression. Show all posts

Friday, December 23, 2016

Hiding true emotions: micro-expressions in eyes retrospectively concealed by mouth movements

Miho Iwasaki & Yasuki Noguchi
Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 22049 (2016)
doi:10.1038/srep22049

Abstract

When we encounter someone we dislike, we may momentarily display a reflexive disgust expression, only to follow-up with a forced smile and greeting. Our daily lives are replete with a mixture of true and fake expressions. Nevertheless, are these fake expressions really effective at hiding our true emotions? Here we show that brief emotional changes in the eyes (micro-expressions, thought to reflect true emotions) can be successfully concealed by follow-up mouth movements (e.g. a smile). In the same manner as backward masking, mouth movements of a face inhibited conscious detection of all types of micro-expressions in that face, even when viewers paid full attention to the eye region. This masking works only in a backward direction, however, because no disrupting effect was observed when the mouth change preceded the eye change. These results provide scientific evidence for everyday behaviours like smiling to dissemble, and further clarify a major reason for the difficulty we face in discriminating genuine from fake emotional expressions.

The article is here.

Editor's note: This research may apply to transference and countertransference reactions in psychotherapy.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Errors in Moral Forecasting

Perceptions of Affect Shape the Gap Between Moral Behaviors and Moral Forecasts

Rimma Teper, Alexa M. Tullett, Elizabeth Page-Gould, and Michael Inzlicht
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 1–14
DOI: 10.1177/0146167215583848

Abstract
Research in moral decision making has shown that there may not be a one-to-one relationship between peoples’ moral forecasts and behaviors. Although past work suggests that physiological arousal may account for part of the behavior forecasting discrepancy, whether or not perceptions of affect play an important determinant remains unclear. Here, we investigate whether this discrepancy may arise because people fail to anticipate how they will feel in morally significant situations. In Study 1, forecasters predicted cheating significantly more on a test than participants in a behavior condition actually cheated. Importantly, forecasters who received false somatic feedback, indicative of high arousal, produced forecasts that aligned more closely with behaviors. In Study 2, forecasters who misattributed their arousal to an extraneous source forecasted cheating significantly more. In Study 3, higher dispositional emotional awareness was related to less forecasted cheating. These findings suggest that perceptions of affect play a key role in the behavior-forecasting dissociation.

The entire article is here.