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

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.

A False Trail to Follow: Differential Effects of the Facial Feedback Signals From the Upper and Lower Face on the Recognition of Micro-Expressions

“…The more spontaneous movement in the upper face may lead to the more accurate mimicking by the upper face when the duration of expression is very short, since the more spontaneous mimicking in upper face may be less dependent on attention and memory ( Ross et al, 2007 ). Consistently, previous studies found that the lower face had more perceptual weight in the perception of micro-expressions ( Iwasaki and Noguchi, 2016 ) and the Chinese participants paid more attention to the lower part of face while interpreting facial expressions ( Mu et al, 2017 ). In addition, the more voluntary movement in the lower face means that it relies more on attention and consciousness.…”

“…The recent evidence showed that facial feedback signals from the full face are disruptive cues for the recognition of subtle micro-expressions ( Wu et al, 2016 ). Growing evidence also found that the lower face has more weight in facial expression recognition (e.g., Calvo et al, 2013a ; Iwasaki and Noguchi, 2016 ), which suggest that the lower face is the main source of disruption for the recognition of subtle micro-expressions. Therefore, we predicted that amplifying facial feedback of the lower face can reduce the recognition accuracy for subtle micro-expressions.…”

“…Additional evidence suggests that the lower face also has more weight in the perception of micro-expressions. Studies have found that micro-expressions on the lower face inhibited conscious detection of all types of micro-expressions on the upper face, even when viewers had paid full attention to the upper face ( Iwasaki and Noguchi, 2016 ). These results are interesting because these results showed that the lower face seems to play a more important role in facial expression recognition.…”

New Insight Regarding the Zygomaticus Minor as Related to Cosmetic Facial Injections

“…Numerous studies have analyzed the movements of skin and soft tissue in the mouth and eye regions to assess the differences between genuine and fake smiles (Calvo et al 2013;Iwasaki and Noguchi, 2016;Jaffer et al, 2016). While both genuine and fake smiles share a contraction of the zygomaticus major (Zmj) muscle that pulls up the corners of the mouth, only a genuine smile also recruits the orbicularis oculi (OOc) muscle around the eyes (Russell and Fernández-Dols, 1997;Duchenne and Cuthbertson, 2006;Iwasaki and Noguchi, 2016).…”

Relaxed Spatio-Temporal Deep Feature Aggregation for Real-Fake Expression Prediction

“…Similar optimum parameter setup can be observed in [29] for action recognition problem. Also, [11] shows that 150 ms frame interval is reasonable to assess micro-level emotional changes for real-fake expression prediction.…”