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Ask the Expert: Your Questions to Dr. Matsumoto Part 5

Humintell is happy to announce that the “Ask the Expert” series is back, with a fifth edition.

In the past we’ve posted several blogs with your (the viewer’s) questions to Humintell director Dr. Matsumoto and his answers.

Take a look at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 by clicking on the appropriate links.

Ask your specific question(s) to Dr. Matsumoto in the comments section above. The questions can be related to anything: microexpressions, facial expressions of emotions in general, culture, emotion, nonverbal behavior, reading body language, recent research or detecting deception.

Please no inappropriate questions! Don’t forget we monitor all questions asked on the blog and inappropriate questions will be deleted.

We’ll select certain questions we think are interesting, interview Dr. Matsumoto and post the responses within two weeks.

Thanks for your participation!

For more information on Dr. Matsumoto, visit his website. Don’t forget to follow him on facebook and twitter.

Our Brain and Facial Expressions

Recognizing facial expressions of emotion is no small task.  As simple as it may sound, many people find it difficult to understand how someone is really responding to their words or actions based upon facial expressions that sometimes only last a fraction of a second.

HindustanTimes reports on a study conducted by Dr. Lesley Fellows that focused on regions of the brain that are connected to face recognition and emotion processing skills.

What they found was that the area of the brain with the biggest impact on emotion recognition was the ventromedial PFC.

Dr. Fellows commented, “Patients with damage to the ventromedial PFC had a hard time distinguishing a neutral facial expression from emotional ones..Patients with left ventrolateral PFC damage recognized that an emotion was present in the expression, but had difficulty telling one emotion from another.”

The study’s findings, published in the Journal Cerebral Cortex, could help to understand some of the difficulties in social behavior seen in illnesses including certain forms of dementia, autism, or after a traumatic brain injury.

The Language of Culture

Culture is central to human success?  Well, that is exactly what author and evolutionary biologist Dr. Mark Pagel suggests in his new book Wired for Culture.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the thesis of Dr. Pagel’s book is that human being’s lives became dominated by culture, they could have adopted habits that did not lead to having more descendants.  However,  we did not.  We set about using culture to favor survival of those like us at the expense of other groups.

In this book, Pagel argues that, “[if our] cultures have promoted our genetic interests throughout our history,” then our “particular culture is not for us, but for our genes.”

He delineates the connection between different languages and diverging cultures.  He calls language “one of the most powerful, dangerous and subversive traits that natural selection has ever devised.”

Do you agree with that statement?

In his book, Pagel goes on to extrapolate that the parallels between genetics and linguistics are that they are both digital systems, in which words or base pairs are recombined to make an infinite possibility of messages.

He writes, “ People will risk their health and well-being, their chances to have children, or even their lives for their culture.  People will treat others well or badly merely as an accident of their cultural inheritance.”

Think about the actions and cultures of other nations.  Do you agree with that statement?

Read more about Pagel’s ideas of language and culture in his book Wired for Culture and let us know your opinion on his theories.

Below is a video of  Dr. Pagel’s ideas regarding how language transformed humanity.

Click here to view the embedded video.