Universality Of Facial Expression


Communication between people is a complicated process. What we say may just be a ritualistic comment. We use body language and facial expression to confirm or deny the sentiments expressed verbally.

Facial expressions have been grouped into just six different expressions. These are Happy, Sad, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Surprise. The concept of this universality of facial expression stems from the idea that we humans all have the same set of facial muscles that we exercise when put on one expression or another.

Jack et al have been worrying about this universality of facial expression and decided to put it to the test like good psychologists and they have published their result in the early edition of PNAS this week.

Their experimental program used 30 people. 15 were Western Caucasian and 15 were Easte Asian. They all had to watch almost 5,000 computer animations of faces going through a range of expressions and classify them using the six categories. In addition they had to rate the emotional intensity. The animations showed both Western Caucasian faces and East Asian ones.

The results confirmed the universality of the six expressions, but only for the Western Caucasians. Things were quite a bit different for the East Asian faces. The expressions weren’t culturally universal and also the emotional intensities were not clear-cut.

Clearly we need to be careful about universality conclusions based on theory without a universal study to confirm. Culture can easily trump such simplifying assumptions.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/10/1200155109.full.pdf


Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com

Building An Orangutan Nest


A nice comfortable bed is something that we want to have so that we get a good nights rest. We’ll take a lot of time choosing one in the stores as well as shelling out a significant amount of our disposable income. But what do we do when we go on vacation, on a camping trip perhaps? We moan and groan about the hard ground in the mornings.

Our primate relatives move around a lot and don’t have the luxury of a hi-tech mattress. They make the best of what’s around. Orangutans, for example build nests in trees. They do this every evening and move on next day. Van Casteran et al have watched and filmed the process and then checked the nests out afterwards. Their work is published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1) and reported by the BBC (2).

It is remarkable that the nests are built high up in the trees in about five minutes. Being properly inquisitive, the team had to take a closer look at the nests and took them apart to look at the mechanical properties of the components.

It turns out that Orangutans have good engineering skills. They used stiff branches for the outer supports and thinner, springier ones for the middle, but things are better than that. They twisted the branches so they split and broke part way as they wove them together. This gives a very strong and resilient structure rather like the sheep hurdles made out of split hazel that used to be seen around the English countryside.

Traditionally, we think of tools as objects used to do something else, but this level of constructional expertise requires a skill level that most of us humans don’t have these days. How many of us could build an Orangutan nest in five minutes if at all, and certainly not 100 feet up in a tree with no safety harness?

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/09/1200902109
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17730971


Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com

The Sedentary Life


More and more of our time is spent in watching screens – TVs, monitors and the like, whether on our couch, in an office or on the road. One way or another, many of us are spending a great deal of our time sitting or lying down in a classic sedentary pose.

The sedentary life isn’t good for us, or so we are told by the health gurus. Now, Edwardson et al have been data mining in a big way to produce a meta-data study of the tie up between sedentary living and metabolic syndrome (1). Metabolic syndrome is the term used by the medical cognoscenti to describe those of us with an apple shape (large waist measurement) couple with other risk factors to health such as high blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels.

The medical databases were rifled through thoroughly to yield a group of 21,393 men and women with good reliable data. About a quarter of the group were classified as having metabolic syndrome and there was no difference between men and women in the correlation of sedentary behavior and a markedly increased chance of having metabolic syndrome.

The authors of the study conclude that “it might be important to recommend a reduction in sedentary behaviors.”

To sort through the huge sets of data, select or reject data, then number crunch, check for reliability, write the paper, discuss and proof read must have involved a great deal of sedentary behavior by the reporting team. I trust they will have made up for it on the treadmills of academe since.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034916


Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com

Worrying About It


We all know people who we would classify as worriers, and we may include ourselves in that category. Most of us start to worry about something that we have to do for the first time, but why is that? Our imagination is the guilty party as we remember something that might have been similar and our memories are distorted by our fears and these feed back into our current worries.

As we get older, we often get more cynical about new experience as we have built up a library of bad ones. The trouble is those memories get worse the more we worry about related things so that in the end we may be worrying about repeating false memories.

Our psychology friends from U Amsterdam have published a paper this week in PLoS one which shows how this comes about (1). They took 48 young students and connected up their wrists to and electricity supply. When the switch was thrown, the participants had an “uncomfortable stimulus’ (not unbearable pain, but just not something that you don't want again).

25 of these were then asked a series of difficult civic questions after which their worry status was estimated from things like skin conductance, and eye blink rate when subjected to a loud noise. The remaining 23 students were asked worrisome questions about further electric shocks.

The results were clear. Those participants whose attention had been draw to worrying about future nastiness in the form of more shocking exposure increased the fear response about future outcomes.

This is clearly an important survival learning response, which our animal friends often apply very rapidly. We being a more naïve species often need to get a bit older to start worrying.

The latest news about the attempts to mess with the freedom of the Internet as outlined by Brin (2) have me extremely worried. Governments all over the world are getting into the censoring/monitoring game and large Internet based companies are getting very proprietorial as well and are tying their customers up in red tape with neat little bows. Democracy and free speech can only be the loser as we rush headlong into systems where power either comes out of the barrel of a gun or  a checkbook.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034882
  2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/web-freedom-threat-google-brin
  3.  


Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com

Seeing Red


The color red has great significance to us primates. In some circumstances it can be a warning, but in others it can be a come-on. We humans lead a more complex social life than most baboons, so how do we see red?

On one hand we see it as a symbol for glory days with flashy uniforms while on the other a reminder of gory days as it is a common color for medical academic dress. So if we put the blood and glory on one side where else does red rule our lives?

Like our primate cousins, we see red as a warning sign so a red traffic light means stop. And, of course, our mothers will have warned us about ‘scarlet women’ although I doubt if many heed that warning and see a red dress in the same light as a traffic instruction.

Some new work by Elliot and Pazda in last week’s PLoS one has investigated the use of red by women in the Internet dating game (1). They trolled through a couple of websites and randomly picked 500 women from each to check out their preferred colors.

Black was a universally popular color for clothing, but what about the use of other colors? Three studies were done. Firstly, they studied a group of women who were interested in long-term relationships with implications for marriage. They also studied a group that indicated that they were interested in casual sexual relations, and finally, they checked out a group who thought that maybe they might be interested in casual sex.

The results were clear. Women wearing red were strikingly more interested in casual sexual relationships than other colors such as blue, green, etc. So it seems that the tradition of the scarlet woman is still alive and well in our cyber world. I stress that pink isn’t a maybe-indicator of a half-hearted interest. It’s red or nothing.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0034607


Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com