Facial and vocal cues of deception and honesty

Facial expressions and vocal cues (filtered speech) of honest and deceptive messages were examined in posed and spontaneous situations. The question of interest was the degree to which nonverbal cues transmit information about deception. Results indicated that (a) for both the facial and vocal channels, posing (as compared to spontaneous behavior) produced a higher level of communication accuracy; (b) facial expressions of deceptive (as compared to honest) messages were rated as less pleasant, while vocal expressions of deception were rated as less honest, less assertive, and less dominant, particularly in the posed condition; (c) the sender's ability to convey honesty was negatively correlated with his/her ability to convey deception, suggesting the existence of a demeanor bias—individual senders tend to appear and sound consistently honest (or dishonest) regardless of whether they deliver an honest or a deceptive message; (d) in the posing condition, the sender's abilities to convey honesty/deception via facial and vocal cues were positively and significantly correlated, whereas in the spontaneous condition they were not; and (e) senders whose full (unfiltered) speech indicated more involvement with their responses were judged as more honest from both their vocal (filtered speech) and facial cues, in both the honest and deceptive conditions.     

Nonverbal Behaviors,Persuasion, and Credibility

This study examined the relationships among nonverbal behaviors, dimensions of source credibility, and speaker persuasiveness in a public speaking context. Relevant nonverbal literature was organized according to a Brunswikian lens model. Nonverbal behavioral composites, grouped according to their likely proximal percepts, were hypothesized to significantly affect both credibility and persuasiveness. A sample of 60 speakers gave videotaped speeches that were judged on credibility and persuasiveness by classmates. Pairs of trained raters coded 22 vocalic, kinesic, and proxemic nonverbal behaviors evidenced in the tapes. Results confirmed numerous associations between nonverbal behaviors and attributions of credibility and persuasiveness. Greater perceived competence and composure were associated with greater vocal and facial pleasantness, with greater facial expressiveness contributing to competence perceptions. Greater sociability was associated with more kinesic/proxemic immediacy, dominance, and relaxation and with vocal pleasantness. Most of these same cues also enhanced character judgments. No cues were related to dynamism judgments. Greater perceived persuasiveness correlated with greater vocal pleasantness (especially fluency and pitch variety), kinesic/proxemic immediacy, facial expressiveness, and kinesic relaxation (especially high random movement but little tension). All five dimensions of credibility related to persuasiveness. Advantages of analyzing nonverbal cues according to proximal percepts are discussed.     

A study of the relationship between individual differences in nonverbal expressiveness and factors of personality and social interaction

Some theoretical and applied implications of individual differences in nonverbal expressiveness were investigated in a medical setting. In Study I, the abilities of 21 physicians to express different emotions through voice tone were assessed and related to physician personality and to actual patient ratings of the physician. Study II replicated Study I using visual as well as vocal cues (i.e., videotapes) of a new sample of physicians, and added a study of physician greetings. It was found that: (1) Aspects of expressive ability were reliably correlated with a cluster of personality traits, thus supporting the notion that nonverbal affective style may be a window to inner dispositions; and (2) expressive ability was related to patient satisfaction with the interpersonal manner of their physicians and to the judged likeability of the physician's greeting, thus providing evidence for the importance of this ability for social interaction.     

Posed and spontaneous communication of emotion via facial and vocal cues1

Subjects' facial expressions were videotaped without their knowledge while they watched two pleasant and two unpleasant videotaped scenes (spontaneous facial encoding). Later, subjects' voices were audiotaped while describing their reactions to the scenes (vocal encoding). Finally, subjects were videotaped with their knowledge while they posed appropriate facial expressions to the scenes (posed facial encoding). The videotaped expressions were presented for decoding to the same subjects. The vocal material, both the original version and an electronically filtered version, was rated by judges other than the original senders. Results were as follows: (a) accuracy of vocal encoding (measured by ratings of both the filtered and unfiltered versions) was positively related to accuracy of facial encoding; (b) posing increased the accuracy of facial communication, particularly for more pleasant affects and less intense affects; (c) encoding of posed cues was correlated with encoding of spontaneous cues and decoding of posed cues was correlated with decoding of spontaneous cues; (d) correlations, within encoding and decoding, of similar scenes were positive while those among dissimilar scenes were low or negative; (e) while correlations between total encoding and total decoding were positive and low, correlations between encoding and decoding of the same scene were negative; (f) there were sex differences in decoding ability and in the relationships of personality variables with encoding and decoding of facial cues.     

Facial attractiveness and vocal likeability as determinants of nonverbal sending skills1

Recent studies have examined the self-fulfilling effects of the physical attractiveness stereotype on a person's development of social skills. The potential of vocal qualities to have similar effects has not been investigated. The present study examined the relation of attractiveness (as judged from the face) and likeability of the person (as judged from the voice) to a specific social skill—the ability to send nonverbal cues of emotion. It was found that facial attractiveness and vocal likeability increased sending accuracy of facial and vocal cues respectively, particularly for pleasant affects. The greater accuracy of facially attractive senders tended to be especially emphasized for posed (as compared to spontaneous) expressions, indicating that their superiority reflected a controllable skill. The need for further research in the tradition of “what is (vocally) likeable is good” was noted.     

Multiple Framing: Verbal,Facial, and Vocal Cues in Risky Choice

Verbal framing effects have been widely studied, but little is known about how people react to multiple framing cues in risk communication, where verbal messages are often accompanied by facial and vocal cues. We examined joint and differential effects of verbal, facial, and vocal framing on risk preference in hypothetical monetary and life–death situations. In the multiple framing condition with the factorial design (2 verbal frames × 2 vocal tones × 4 basic facial expressions × 2 task domains), each scenario was presented auditorily with a written message on a photo of the messenger's face. Compared with verbal framing effects resulting in preference reversal, multiple frames made risky choice more consistent and shifted risk preference without reversal. Moreover, a positive tone of voice increased risk‐seeking preference in women. When the valence of facial and vocal cues was incongruent with verbal frame, verbal framing effects were significant. In contrast, when the affect cues were congruent with verbal frame, framing effects disappeared. These results suggest that verbal framing is given higher priority when other affect cues are incongruent. Further analysis revealed that participants were more risk‐averse when positive affect cues (positive tone or facial expressions) were congruently paired with a positive verbal frame whereas participants were more risk‐seeking when positive affect cues were incongruent with the verbal frame. In contrast, for negative affect cues, congruency promoted risk‐seeking tendency whereas incongruency increased risk‐aversion. Overall, the results show that facial and vocal cues interact with verbal framing and significantly affect risk communication. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is there an advantage for recognizing multi-modal emotional stimuli?

Emotions can be recognized whether conveyed by facial expressions, linguistic cues (semantics), or prosody (voice tone). However, few studies have empirically documented the extent to which multi-modal emotion perception differs from uni-modal emotion perception. Here, we tested whether emotion recognition is more accurate for multi-modal stimuli by presenting stimuli with different combinations of facial, semantic, and prosodic cues. Participants judged the emotion conveyed by short utterances in six channel conditions. Results indicated that emotion recognition is significantly better in response to multi-modal versus uni-modal stimuli. When stimuli contained only one emotional channel, recognition tended to be higher in the visual modality (i.e., facial expressions, semantic information conveyed by text) than in the auditory modality (prosody), although this pattern was not uniform across emotion categories. The advantage for multi-modal recognition may reflect the automatic integration of congruent emotional information across channels which enhances the accessibility of emotion-related knowledge in memory.     

Intermodal perception of expressive behaviors by human infants

Four experiments demonstrate that infants of 5 and 7 months can detect information that is invariant across the acoustic and optic presentations of a single affective expression. Infants were presented simultaneously with two filmed facial expressions accompanied by a single vocal expression characteristic of one of the facial expressions. The infants increased their looking time to a facial expression when it was sound-specified, as compared to when that filmed expression was projected silently. Even when synchrony relations were disrupted, infants looked proportionately longer to the film that was sound-specified, indicating that some factor other than temporal synchrony guided the infants' looking behavior. When infants viewed the filmed facial expressions either in a normal orientation or upside-down, those infants viewing the facial expressions in the normal orientation looked appropriately, while those viewing the inverted films did not. These findings support the view that infants are sensitive to amodal, potentially meaningful invariant relations in expressive behaviors. These results are discussed in the context of J. J. Gibson's theory of affordances.     

3～5岁儿童基于声音线索的情绪知觉

研究从言语的韵律和语义两条线索出发,试图探讨学前儿童基于声音线索情绪知觉的发展特点.实验一中,124名3～5岁儿童对男、女性用5种不同情绪(高兴、生气、害怕、难过和中性)的声音表达的中性语义句子进行了情绪类型上的判断.3～5岁儿童基于声音韵律线索情绪知觉能力随着年龄的增长不断提高,主要表现在生气、害怕和中性情绪上.不同情绪类型识别的发展轨迹不完全相同,总体来说,高兴的声音韵律最容易识别,而害怕是最难识别的.当韵律和语义线索冲突时,学前儿童更多地依赖韵律线索来判断说话者的情绪状态.被试对女性用声音表达的情绪更敏感.     

Impression formation: the role of expressive behavior

This research examined the effects of personality/social skills and individual differences in expressive style on impression formation. Particular attention was given to the role of nonverbal behaviors in the formation of initial impressions. Sixty-two subjects were measured on self-report personality and communication skill scales, on posed emotional sending ability, and on physical attractiveness. Subjects were then videotaped while giving a spontaneous "explanation." Trained coders measured five separate nonverbal cue factors displayed by the subjects in the videotapes. Groups of untrained judges viewed the tapes and rated their impressions of the subjects on scales of likability, speaking effectiveness, and expressivity-confidence. Male subjects who were nonverbally skilled and extraverted tended to display more outwardly focused and fluid expressive behaviors, and made more favorable impressions on judges, than did males who scored low on the measures of nonverbal skills and extraversion. Females who were nonverbally skilled displayed more facial expressiveness, which led to more favorable initial impressions. Sex differences may reflect basic differences in the acquisition and use of expressive nonverbal cues by males and females.     

The effect of modification of expressive displays on vicarious emotional arousal

Several recent experiments have demonstrated that modulation of the facial expressive response is accompanied by changes in autonomic arousal and subjective response to painful stimuli. The present study asked whether facial self-regulation may also bring about changes in covert vicarious emotional experience. Three groups of subjects were exposed to a videotaped model displaying intermittent pain to shock in a differential vicarious autonomic conditioning paradigm. Subjects in the inhibit and amplify groups were asked, respectively, (a) to inhibit their facial muscles or (b) to pose a facial response of pain when the model was shocked. It was predicted that the inhibit group would show less autonomic arousal to the model's expressive display (empathy) and less conditioning (as measured by skin conductance and heart rate change), and the amplify group more empathy and conditioning, than a third group who was given no facial instruction. In fact, the amplify group showed more skin conductance arousal, heart rate acceleration, and activity in response to the model's expressive display of pain than did the other two groups (which were not different from each other), but no more autonomic or facial conditioning. The overall pattern of physiological data is interpreted as generally supportive of a facial feedback theory of emotion: where significant between-groups' differences were obtained in facial activity, as in vicarious instigation, autonomic arousal differences also emerged; where no expressive differences were obtained, as in vicarious conditioning, no differences in autonomic arousal were found.     

Managing Face Concerns in Criticism Integrating Nonverbal Behaviors as a Dimension of Politeness in Female Friendship Dyads

This study seeks to expand politeness theory by investigating the influence of nonverbal behaviors on facework in criticism of a friend. As hypothesized, various cues, including variations in vocal tone, facial expressions and brow movements, gestures, body orientation, and touch, influenced participants' perceptions of politeness in a number of ways. First, mitigating nonverbal behaviors added to assessments of politeness when accompanied by bald-on-record linguistic politeness strategies. Second, subjects perceived aggravating nonverbal cues with and without linguistic politeness similarly. Although verbal politeness was still the bigger factor in perceptions of politeness, the results of this study suggest that facework scholars should also consider how something is said as salient for interpretation of what is said.     

The other way around: Effects of causal attributions on estimates of consensus,distinctiveness, and consistency

It was hypothesized that the attributed cause of a given person's behavior will affect inferences about its generalizability over persons (consensus), stimuli (distinctiveness), and circumstances (consistency). Moreover, these effects were expected to parallel the effects of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information on causal attributions. Experiment 1 provided support for these predictions but also showed that attribution affected consensus judgments less than it affected judgments of distinctiveness and consistency, particularly when consensus was not the first characteristic estimated. Using a different set of stimulus materials and a different manipulation of attribution, Experiments 2 and 3 provided further evidence for the effects of attribution on inferences of consensus information. Experiment 3 indicated that the false consensus effect—actors' tendency to assume that the majority of people share their behavior—may be due to actors' tendency to attribute their behavior to situational factors. Implications of the present studies for biased estimates of consensus and the use of consensus and attribution as mediating variables are discussed.     

Task relevant effects on the assessment of cerebral specialization for facial emotion

Hemispheric specialization for processing different types of rapidly exposed stimuli was examined in a forced choice reaction time task. Four conditions of recognition were included: tacial emotion, neutral faces, emotional words, and neutral words. Only the facial emotion condition produced a significant visual field advantage (in favor of the left visual field), but this condition did not differ significantly from the neutral face condition's left visual field superiority. The verbal conditions produced significantly decreased latencies with RVF presentation, while the LVF presentation was associated with decreased latencies on the facial conditions. These results suggested that facial recognition and affective processing cannot be separated as independent factors generating right hemisphere superiority for facial emotion perception, and that task parameters (verbal vs. nonverbal) are important influences upon effects in studies of cerebral specialization.     

Knowing when you don't know enough: Children's judgements about ambiguous information

Two experiments were carried out to find out whether young children's failure to realise when messages are ambiguous is specific to verbally transmitted information about a person's intended meaning. In Experiment 1, children judged whether they had been told/shown enough to identify which one of a set of cards the experimenter had chosen. In one game the experimenter gave verbal messages about her chosen cards, and in a second game, she gave visual messages. With ambiguous visual messages, relevant parts of cards were physically covered. We expected that this would make it more obvious that the speaker's intended meaning was not being fully conveyed. No difference was found between verbal and visual conditions: correct judgements about message ambiguity occured with the same frequency in both.In Experiment 2, children judged in one game whether they had been told enough about the experimenter's chosen card, as in Experiment 1. In a second game, visual information about a card was not conveyed by the experimenter, Rather, the child operated a pointer, set in a disc with windows, beneath which lay cards. The child judged whether the window showed enough for him/her to tell which card the pointer indicated. Again, correct judgments about ambiguity occured with the same frequency in both games.The results implied that children's failure to realise when verbal messages are ambiguous is but one aspect of a more general failure to realise when one has insufficient information at one's disposal to guarantee a correct interpretation of what the world is like.     

Conditioning of counter-empathetic emotional responses

The present research tested the hypothesis that the quality of an observer's vicarious emotional response, as measured by autonomic, expressive, and self-report indexes, is a function of the observer's conditioning history with particular facial expressive displays of emotion. It was predicted that conditions of congruence (Symmetry) between the affective expression of a model and the outcome (shock or reward) presented to an observer would enhance initial empathetic responses, but that conditions of incongruence (Asymmetry) between the model's displays and observer's outcomes would lead to counter-empathetic responses. These changes in the quality of observers' vicarious emotional responses should generalize to a test phase when no rewards or punishments are presented to observers. The results for all measures were consistent and indicate that asymmetric conditioning modified the initial empathetic responses of observers to either counter-empathetic responses or indifference. On the other hand, symmetric conditioning enhanced observers' initial empathetic responses. These effects were evident in the test phase when no reinforcements were administered to the subject. The results are consistent with the theoretical assumption that facial expressions of emotion can acquire meaning and hedonic valence because of their predictive significance and thus can function as conditioned stimuli capable of evoking empathetic and counter-empathetic emotional responses.     

Can perceivers recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions?

Posed stimuli dominate the study of nonverbal communication of emotion, but concerns have been raised that the use of posed stimuli may inflate recognition accuracy relative to spontaneous expressions. Here, we compare recognition of emotions from spontaneous expressions with that of matched posed stimuli. Participants made forced-choice judgments about the expressed emotion and whether the expression was spontaneous, and rated expressions on intensity (Experiments 1 and 2) and prototypicality (Experiment 2). Listeners were able to accurately infer emotions from both posed and spontaneous expressions, from auditory, visual, and audiovisual cues. Furthermore, perceived intensity and prototypicality were found to play a role in the accurate recognition of emotion, particularly from spontaneous expressions. Our findings demonstrate that perceivers can reliably recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions, and that depending on the comparison set, recognition levels can even be equivalent to that of posed stimulus sets.     

中国、波兰大学生对基于声音线索的情绪知觉*

研究考察了42名大学生（中国21人,波兰21人）对男、女性用5种不同情绪声音（高兴、生气、害怕、难过和中性）表达的中性语义句子的情绪类型和强度判断,从而分析中国、波兰不同文化背景下,个体对基于声音线索的情绪知觉差异。结果表明：（1）中国被试对声音情绪类型判断的正确率以及情绪强度的评定上均高于波兰被试,说明在声音情绪知觉上存在组内优势;（2）所有被试对女性声音材料情绪类型识别的正确率以及情绪强度的评定均高于对男性声音材料;（3）在对情绪类型判断上,被试对害怕情绪识别的正确率高于对高兴、难过和中性情绪,对中性情绪识别的正确率最低;（4）在情绪强度评定上,被试对害怕情绪的评定强度高于对难过情绪,对高兴情绪的评定强度最低。     

Intentional communication in the chimpanzee: The development of deception

Communication about the location of a hidden incentive was studied in chimpanzee-human dyads, in which each member of a pair served alternately as “sender” and “recipient” of information. When the human cooperated with the chimpanzee in finding the goal, from the very beginning the chimpanzees were able to produce and comprehend behavioral cues which conveyed accurate locational information. When the human and chimpanzee competed for the goal, the chimpanzees learned both to withhold information or mislead the recipient, and to discount or controvert the sender's own misleading cues. The chimpanzee's ability to convey and utilize both accurate and misleading information, by taking into account the nature of the sender or recipient, provides evidence of a capacity for intentional communication in this nonhuman primate species.