Have You Ever Been Lied To?

Welcome To The World Of Micro-Expressions



"The average person tells at least 3 lies per 10 minutes of conversation"
"The average person tells 1,460 lies a year or more"
"Some people are naturals at being able to tell if someone is lying"

There has been a lot of debate about lies.
There has been a lot of debate about whether you can spot lies.
There has been a lot of debate about how you spot lies.
There is also going to be some debate on whether or not someone is lying in the first place.

One thing that can't be debated is this : The face doesn't lie.

Besides the Facial Action Coding System, (which taxonomizes facial expressions and takes years to master) you can easily spot lies on the face.

Types of micro expressions are :

Simulated Expressions: When a micro expression is not accompanied by a genuine expression.
Neutralized Expressions: Expression is suppressed and the face remains neutral.
Masked Expressions: When a genuine expression is completely masked by a falsified expression.

en.wikipedia.org...

There are 7 universal emotions : Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, Happiness, Surprise, and Contempt.

It doesn't matter if your green, purple, black, white,
Chinese, or Korean. You could be a cute little
innocent girl with a lollipop, or a suicide bomber.
If your disgusted or surprised, your face will show it.

There is a trick to this though. They only last
for 1/25 to 1/15 of a second. The way around
the trick is to know what your looking at. As you
may or may not already know, some people
are naturals at spotting lies on the face.
They don't know what they are seeing, but
they are seeing it none-the-less.

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Now its time to show you...Contempt.

This one is quite easy to spot. You may have seen it one before.
Contempt is one the corner of the mouth is tightened and raised.
One part of your mouth is smiling, the other isn't.
Its sort of a asymmetrical smile if you will.
What happens when you hear a conversation like this...

Women : "You know that Chrissys brother Tom lost his job?"
Women#@ : "WOW, I didn't even know. I'm so sorry for him"
And then see this...



This means shes not sorry for him. This is a hidden smile.
Hidden happiness. We know she wanted this to happen,
but what we don't know is why. Until we found out. Thats
contempt for you.




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Now we have disgust.

With disgust, you'll have a lot going on between the eyes and
above the nose. The upper-lip is raised, and there is nose
wrinkling. Everything centers in that area.





Again, we'll know your disgusted. We just won't know why.

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Then we go to anger.

With anger the eyebrows are pulled down,
the lips narrow and tighten and the eyes glare.
The margins of the lips may also be rolled in.





Anger takes time to build up. So spotting someone with
fake anger is easy. This one is useful. So we'll know if your
angry or faking being angry. We just won't know why.


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Here we have the suprised emotion!!!

This has got to be my favorite emotion. A lot of people have been known to fake this one.
The eyebrows raise, the mouth opens (sometimes) and the eyes widen. If this lasts for more
than 1/15 of a second, ITS FAKE.

Since I posted this just in time
for Christmas, you might be able to see
a fake surprise look on someones face
because thats the gift they really
wanted from you.






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Next up on the list is fear.
The upper eyelids raise, the mouth
is stretched horizontally towards
ears and the eyebrows are raised
and pulled together.

This is some subtle fear.


Here is some fear masked by a smile.




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Next up, happiness!

Pushed up cheeks, and crows feet wrinkles
are what true happiness is all about. Heres
something you didn't know...No eye wrinkling
means fake happiness!






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Last but not least, sadness.

The lips will pull down slightly, the eyes will droop
and there will be a little bit of lost focus to the eyes.
The eyebrows will also be pulled upward and together.





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Well that concludes my whole thread on microexpressions. Not very good at making threads
here on ATS, but I'll get better. I hope I didn't miss anything, and if I did I'll be sure to post
it here. I'm pretty sure this thing has spelling errors and what not so just let me know.
I'll get to work on my body language thread right about now! Enjoy!

good thread. i've been aware of microexpressions ever since I watched the Watchmen.
an interesting concept, it's been hard not to be aware of it, ever since, in most conversations I find myself, I can see them clear as day. it's hard not to feel bad for people who can't hide their emotions as much as they'd like.

as for lying, I learned young what it causes and what you can gain to lose. I stop myself from lying when I remember where I am because of it.

reply to post by Vandettas


I am lied to all of the time I am an American.

I wouldn't lie to you. Well I may lie to you. I would lie to you.

Do you believe me?

reply to post by yourmaker

What I find interesting about this stuff is that it seems to be universal.
One might easily expect to find cultural patterns, habits that reflect individual societies demonstrating themselves in this manner, but according to the findings of Paul Ekman and others, these expressions seem to transcend local influences and stem from something deeper.

To me, this kind of information helps define how much of what we consider our own individuality is truly not.
We are more like one another than most of us like to admit.

reply to post by TerryMcGuire

I think that many of the reactions are involuntary physical ones though. Shock, horror, extreme happiness etc. We might have a different laugh sound, but when you find something really funny, its hard not to laugh and then the body takes over. At least that's how it usually happens to me.

OP I had seen a video explaining the micro-expressions but some are so quick that I seem to miss most of them. It's a very handy skill to have though. I go more by body language and speech but would love to add this one to my social skill set. Great pics and thanks for posting.

Originally posted by LightSpeedDriver
reply to post by TerryMcGuire

 

I think that many of the reactions are involuntary physical ones though. Shock, horror, extreme happiness etc. We might have a different laugh sound, but when you find something really funny, its hard not to laugh and then the body takes over. At least that's how it usually happens to me.

OP I had seen a video explaining the micro-expressions but some are so quick that I seem to miss most of them. It's a very handy skill to have though. I go more by body language and speech but would love to add this one to my social skill set.

Great pics and thanks for posting.

Some people practice spotting micro-expressions at the fastest speed possible. I think its at about 1/10 of a second. Body language is a good way to spot lies, but I found that it fails more than trying to spot on the face.
And yes, most of them are involuntary and some are not.

Originally posted by Vandettas
One thing that can't be debated is this : The face doesn't lie.

Great thread, I love this subject and you did a great job presenting it!

I saw a TV how about microexpressions and the experts seemed a little less confident than your claim in red. Every micro-expression they analyzed had some kind of qualifier like "probably" as in "what this microexpression is telling us is probably..."

I think there is really something to this. However it has a ways to go before the science can be reliably demonstrated. For example, try videotaping some microexpressions, and then have different experts analyze them, and see if they come up with the same analysis. To some extent on the TV show I saw, there were some differences, so it's not an exact science, but it is one worth pursuing.

Once the science is more firmly established, I could even see an i-Phone app for this, where you could pretend to be glancing at a text message while someone is talking to you, but the iphone app could analyze their microexpressions and tell you if they really mean what they are saying or if they are lying...wouldn't that be both cool and scary at the same time? That's pretty far off, though a teenager may live long enough to see something like it in their lifetime.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

Agreed. There can be no certainty in this kind of people-watching, though some people will be naturally very good at it while others will be hopeless. Illustrated examples and instruction manuals are really no help.

The reason they don’t help is that humans, like all animals of a given species, are engaged in an evolutionary arms race with one another. This race is driven by intraspecific competition.

It is in the interest of each of us to learn to read others’ expressions so as to gain an advantage over them in the endless competition for resources, status and mates. It is equally in our interest to learn to control our expressions so as not to give away valuable information to the others against whom we are competing.

Thus, there is an imperative from natural selection to keep getting better at reading each others’ body and facial language, as well as an imperative to keep getting better at hiding our own.

This implies that expressions will keep changing all the time, and that no two individuals will have quite the same expression set in reaction to a given stimulus or set of stimuli. And any attempt to break the subject down into rules and examples people can easily follow will soon result in those rules and examples becoming outdated, because people will get wise and start changing their expressions again.

It is impossible to live in any form of a society and not breathe in the fresh scent of lie.

This is useful information, in some respects. In others it is beyond useless. Being able to tell when someone is deliberately lying or misleading you, is of course, an important social tool, and of great benifit to those who wish to observe the open, stinking guts of politics.

However, these days the truely dangerous people are those who do not know that the falsehood they are spreading, is infact strewn with error, or an outright lie. For instance, a truely ignorant person would say something like " The WHO is an organisation that I trust to look after the wellfare of all human kind, in an ethical, and morally centred fashion, and I do not believe that they are involved in any action which does not benifit the people of Earth".

If the person saying this truely believes it to be the case, the micro expression will tell you nothing, other than that the person who spoke, did so in good faith. All to often however, it is the ability of organisations, individuals, and so on, to make OTHERS believe thier twaddle, and repeat it, that is the issue.

That said, observing the reactions on the face, of persons when exposed to certain questioning and analysis can be interesting and informative, especially when you already have a suspicion about a person or group. Asking the tough questions must be tempered with skills like these in order to be able to find out who is genuine , and who turned up for the paycheck.

Yea, I saw Lie to Me too.

Even at best, micro-expressions are nothing more than educated guesswork. Paul Ekman has made micro-expressions out to be a human lie detector test, and is pushing it like a common salesman.

Many times by a human..................never by a dog.

Originally posted by fallethix
Yea, I saw Lie to Me too.

Even at best, micro-expressions are nothing more than educated guesswork. Paul Ekman has made micro-expressions out to be a human lie detector test, and is pushing it like a common salesman.

edit on 12-12-2011 by fallethix because: (no reason given)

Its not all about the show. The science is actually real.

Originally posted by Vandettas
Its not all about the show. The science is actually real.

Yea, like I said... educated guesswork.