Abstract
Micro-expressions, as fleeting facial expressions, are very important for judging people’s true emotions, thus can provide an essential behavioral clue for lie and dangerous demeanor detection. From embodied accounts of cognition, we derived a novel hypothesis that facial feedback from upper and lower facial regions has differential effects on micro-expression recognition. This hypothesis was tested and supported across three studies. Specifically, the results of Study 1 showed that people became better judges of intense micro-expressions with a duration of 450 ms when the facial feedback from upper face was enhanced via a restricting gel. Additional results of Study 2 showed that the recognition accuracy of subtle micro-expressions was significantly impaired under all duration conditions (50, 150, 333, and 450 ms) when facial feedback from lower face was enhanced. In addition, the results of Study 3 also revealed that blocking the facial feedback of lower face, significantly boosted the recognition accuracy of subtle and intense micro-expressions under all duration conditions (150 and 450 ms). Together, these results highlight the role of facial feedback in judging the subtle movements of micro-expressions.
Highlights
Facial expressions are the most intuitive windows for people to express their emotions and intentions
Facial feedback signals from different partial face areas may have different effects on micro-expression recognition: While facial feedback from the lower face is deleterious for micro-expression recognition, facial feedback from the upper face may still be beneficial
Further simple effects analysis showed that ratings of resistance of the target regions were significantly increased after wearing the gel (Fs > 1179.63, ps < 0.001; see Table 1), and the facial feedback manipulation only led to increased ratings of resistance in the target regions (Fs < 0.18, ps > 0.67)
Summary
Facial expressions are the most intuitive windows for people to express their emotions and intentions. Researchers have found that, despite our efforts to hide, the true emotions may still leak These leaked emotions are usually displayed in the form of micro-expressions (Ekman and O’Sullivan, 2006; Ekman, 2009; Porter et al, 2012; Yan et al, 2013). Micro-expression is a fleeting facial expression which lasts no longer than 0.5 s (Frank et al, 2009b; Matsumoto and Hwang, 2011; Yan et al, 2013) It usually occurs in the high-stake situations, especially for people who have something important to gain or lose (Ekman, 2009). Due to the close relationship between micro-expression and deception, recognizing micro-expressions is believed to be one of the most reliable methods to detect lies (e.g., Weinberger, 2010; ten Brinke and Porter, 2012; Frank and Svetieva, 2015)
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