BECOMING A FACIAL DECODER
I. Background
Paul Ekman is a psychologist known for his study about facial expressions, where facial expressions reveal true emotions. Researchers have distinguished real smiles (so called Duchenne smile) from fake smiles. Ekman and his associates have developed methods to detect other emotions suchas anger, disgust and distress. They call their method as Facial Action Coding System (FACS).
FACS has been used to study the facial expressions of CEOs and found that they vary dramatically not only in their Duchenne smiles but also in the degree to which they display positive versus negative facial expressions.
II. Study/Analysis
Study Questions:
1. Most research suggests we are not very good at detecting lying, and we think we’re much better than we dare. Do you believe FACS would help improve your ability to detect lying in others?
In our day to day endeavor, whether in business, at school or even at our own homes we are bound to judge other peoples intention through their actions. We carry on judgments that determine whether people around us are lying or not.
There are some jobs that require judgments whether the person is lying or not, such as Police Officers, Detectives and Lawyers (Seager, 2004). It may came to a surprise that even these professionals sometimes are not as good in detecting deceptions and lying. According to the study conducted by Feeley & Young (1998), people are not that good in detecting lies. Thus in order for us to give accurate and sound judgment sometimes we need considerable amount of time to weigh things out before coming up into a decision.
The study of Ekman, Sullivan & Frank (1999) revealed that only a very small percentage of professionals achieved accuracy of judgments in determining who was lying and the higher accuracy rate, individual abilities within those groups still varied.
Facial Action Sytem(FACS) is a system
References: Seager, P. B. (2004). Detecting Lies: Are You As Good As You Think You Are? Forensic Update, 77, 5-9. http://www.slideshare.net/dberglu/detecting-deception. http://www.academia.edu/419290/The_Business_Case_for_Corporate_Social_Responsibility_A_Review_of_Concepts_Research_and_Practice. http://lifetrainingonline.com/blog/how-to-detect-lies.htm.