Never trust a person's face: Research

Facial expressions might not be reliable indicators of emotion, say researchers, adding that, people should never trust a person's face.

According to the study, some businesses are even working on technology to determine customer satisfaction through facial expressions.

"The question we really asked is: 'Can we truly detect emotion from facial articulations?' And the basic conclusion is, no, you can't," said study researcher Aleix Martinez from Ohio State University in the US.

For the findings, the researchers focused on building computer algorithms that analyse facial expressions.

The researchers analysed the kinetics of muscle movement in the human face and compared those muscle movements with a person's emotions.

They found that attempts to detect or define emotions based on a person's facial expressions were almost always wrong.

"Everyone makes different facial expressions based on context and cultural background," Martinez said.

"And it's important to realize that not everyone who smiles is happy. Not everyone who is happy smiles. I would even go to the extreme of saying most people who do not smile are not necessarily unhappy," Martinez added.

It is also true, that sometimes, people smile out of an obligation to the social norms, the researchers said.

This would not inherently be a problem, he said -- people are certainly entitled to put on a smile for the rest of the world -- but some companies have begun developing technology to recognize facial muscle movements and assign emotion or intent to those movements.

The research group analyzed some of those technologies and, Martinez said, largely found them lacking.

"Some claim they can detect whether someone is guilty of a crime or not, or whether a student is paying attention in class, or whether a customer is satisfied after a purchase," he said. "

What our research showed is that those claims are complete baloney. There's no way you can determine those things. And worse, it can be dangerous," he added.

After analysing data about facial expressions and emotion, the research team concluded that it takes more than expressions to correctly detect emotion.

"What we showed is that when you experience emotion, your brain releases peptides -- mostly hormones -- that change the blood flow and blood composition, and because the face is inundated with these peptides, it changes colour," Martinez said.

According to the researchers, facial colour, for example, can help provide clues.

In one experiment, the researchers showed study participants a picture cropped to display just a man's face. The man's mouth is open in an apparent scream; his face is bright red.

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Scientists decode physical impact of smiles

Not all smiles express warmth and joy, but they can also be mean. 

Human bodies tend to react differently depending on the message a smile is meant to send, says a psychologists. 

The study showed that smiles meant to convey dominance are associated with a physical reaction "a spike in stress hormones" in their targets.

On the other hand, smiles intended as a reward, to reinforce behaviour, appear to physically buffer recipients against stress.

Researchers established three major types of smiles as dominance -- meant to convey status --, affiliation -- which communicates a bond and shows you are not a threat --, and reward -- the sort of beaming, toothy smile you would give someone to let them know they are making you happy.

"Our results show that subtle differences in the way you make facial expressions while someone is talking to you can fundamentally change their experience, their body, and the way they feel like you are evaluating them," said a psychology graduate.

For the study, the team stressed out male college students by giving them a series of short, impromptu speaking assignments judged over a webcam by a fellow student.

The speakers' heart rates and levels of cortisol -- a hormone associated with stress were measured.
"If they received dominance smiles, which they would interpret as negative and critical, they felt more stress, and their cortisol went up and stayed up longer after their speech," said co-author.

"If they received reward smiles, they reacted to that as approval, and it kept them from feeling as much stress and producing as much cortisol," the author added.

Participants with high heart-rate variability have shown stronger physiological reactions to the different smiles, while the variability is not innate and unalterable.

However, certain disorders like obesity, cardiovascular disease, anxiety and depression can drag down the heart-rate variability, which can make it difficult to recognise and react to social signals such as dominance and reward smiles, the author said.

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What doctors say without talking ?

Teaching good communication skills has been mandatory for medical schools because of research showing that good patient-doctor communication can lead to improved patient satisfaction and better health care outcomes. To this end, medical educators have developed a host of communication courses and workshops that combine lectures, self-assessments, video recordings and “standardised patients,” or actors in the role of patients.

More recently, many schools have broadened their courses to include “cultural competency,” or the ability to communicate with those from different racial, ethnic and social backgrounds. Studies have shown that while a patient’s race and ethnicity can be linked to sharply different treatment courses and quality, better communication between doctors and patients of different backgrounds can reduce the disparities.

Despite these efforts, there is one area of communication to which few schools have devoted significant time: body language and facial expressions.

Now, a small but growing body of research is revealing that the non-verbal component of the patient-doctor interaction — the subtle gestures, body positions, eye contact, touch and expressions that pass between individuals — is as critical a part of communication as verbal expressions. And non-verbal cues may, in fact, be more reflective of the biases faced by doctors and patients.

In a recent study, medical sociologists analysed the interactions between 30 primary care doctors and more than 200 patients over age 65, and found that white physicians tended to treat older patients similarly, regardless of race. Black physicians, on the other hand, often gave white patients contradictory signals, mixing positive non-verbal behaviours, like prolonged smiling or eye contact, with negative ones, like creating physical barriers by crossing the arms or legs.

The finding was reminiscent of earlier studies on interactions between female doctors and male patients, in which the doctors tended to give the patients conflicting non-verbal cues, combining, for example, smiles with a negative or anxious tone of voice. These mixed signals,   are a result of dealing with “a status in our society that is devalued.” Rather than being expressed explicitly, biases regarding race and gender tend to be expressed “in behaviours not consciously controlled.

Some doctors believe that greater emphasis on non-verbal communication can help medical educators address some social biases that affect patient care. But they acknowledge that the process is challenging. Research in this area is still relatively sparse, and few medical educators are well-versed in this topic. Moreover, even experts are unsure of how researchers and educators can measure the nuances and complexities of non-verbal communication accurately, consistently and efficiently.