Got a poker face? Researchers can unmask your game

You may think you have been blessed with a great poker face – an inscrutable expression that you can call upon to conceal your emotions in any given situation – but some Canadian researchers are betting they can disabuse you of that notion by reading telltale “microexpressions” on your kisser.

Researchers have long been aware of microexpressions – lightning-fast, almost imperceptible facial expressions that tell the real story of what people are thinking. In a new study titled “Reading Between the Lies” published in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax claim that “emotional leakage” – the inability to hide true feelings that signal what is going on in your mind – will betray you, and there is nothing you can do about it.

We recognize the nervous twitch, the twiddling of the thumbs, the flushed cheeks or itchy earlobe as tipoffs that something may not be quite right with a story that someone is trying to feed us. And the eyes. How often they can betray those who take liberties with the truth.

The old Eagles hit tune “Lyin’ Eyes” tells the sad tale of a gold-digging woman who regularly cheats on her rich elderly husband. The song memorializes one of pop music’s great comments on infidelity: “I thought by now you’d realize there ain’t no way to hide your lyin’ eyes.” A very long time ago, St. James said it in a more highbrow sort of way. “The face is the mirror of the mind,” the old philosopher suggested, and “the eyes, without speaking, confess the error of the heart.”

Most of us seem aware of the usual body-language clues in assessing someone’s credibility. But nearly imperceptible facial expressions lasting barely a fraction of a second can unmask one’s true thoughts? Who could have known?

I learned almost more than I care to know about the subject while out ramming around in my pickup truck earlier this week enjoying my $3.83 per-gallon gasoline and trying to conceal any microexpressions of despair.

According to a report I heard on CBC Radio, the Dalhousie team of researchers showed television images of happy, sad and neutral situations to 41 college students. As I understood the drill, participants were asked to falsify their facial expressions when viewing each scene – show pleasure with the bad stuff, exhibit sadness when shown an obviously happy event, etc.

Researchers videotaped the procedure and analyzed the results frame by frame, looking for subtle flashes – microexpressions – of true emotion that would indicate the participants’ real feelings about what they had seen. In all 41 cases they found what they were looking for. Unconscious emotions are difficult for people to control, no matter how determined the effort, the study found. The authors did not speculate as to how their experiment might work when applied to psychopathic liars, say, or professional actors, but I’m guessing that if anyone could beat the system it might be a member of either species.

As you might expect, airport authorities see microexpression analysis as a potentially useful tool to complement their existing passenger-screening procedures. Not surprisingly, the American Civil Liberties Union is said to be concerned that the procedure can be another form of racial profiling, despite researchers’ contentions that the phenomenon is not culturally based.

Fertile ground for those involved in microexpression analysis is the high-profile missing-person appeal from people seeking the public’s help in locating a missing family member. Researchers will study a number of videotaped appeals in which the person appealing for help had killed the missing person. They will look for expressions of deceit that will further their research.

In those cases, according to the CBC Radio report, it is difficult to simulate true expressions of distress because brief flashes of other kinds of emotions – contempt, anger and so forth – are beyond the person’s ability to control. Faced with such clues, the investigator must consider the context of the situation and follow up with the right questions.

In a nation in which cell phones and other sophisticated hand-held gadgets can be programmed to do everything but figure out a Medicare statement (some things shall remain forever unsolvable to mankind), it shouldn’t be long before the technology to read between the lies via microexpression analysis is available to the public.

We’ll walk into a Radio Shack store, plunk down our $29.95, plus tax, and walk out with a point-and-click bullchip detector which we can activate in the company of the politicians, snake oil salesmen and bunko artists in our lives.

Advantage, us.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may e-mail him at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.