scholarly journals Sitting in Judgment: How Body Posture Influences Deception Detection and Gazing Behavior

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Mircea Zloteanu ◽  
Eva G. Krumhuber ◽  
Daniel C. Richardson

Body postures can affect how we process and attend to information. Here, a novel effect of adopting an open or closed posture on the ability to detect deception was investigated. It was hypothesized that the posture adopted by judges would affect their social acuity, resulting in differences in the detection of nonverbal behavior (i.e., microexpression recognition) and the discrimination of deceptive and truthful statements. In Study 1, adopting an open posture produced higher accuracy for detecting naturalistic lies, but no difference was observed in the recognition of brief facial expressions as compared to adopting a closed posture; trait empathy was found to have an additive effect on posture, with more empathic judges having higher deception detection scores. In Study 2, with the use of an eye-tracker, posture effects on gazing behavior when judging both low-stakes and high-stakes lies were measured. Sitting in an open posture reduced judges’ average dwell times looking at senders, and in particular, the amount and length of time they focused on their hands. The findings suggest that simply shifting posture can impact judges’ attention to visual information and veracity judgments (Mg = 0.40, 95% CI (0.03, 0.78)).

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mircea Zloteanu ◽  
Daniel C. Richardson

Body postures can affect how we process and attend to information. Here, a novel effect of adopting an open or closed posture on the ability to detect deception was investigated. It was hypothesized that the posture adopted by decoders would affect their social acuity, resulting in differences in the detection of nonverbal behavior and discrimination of deceptive and truthful statements. In Study 1, adopting an open posture produced higher accuracy for detecting naturalistic lies, but no difference in the recognition of brief facial expressions, as compared to adopting a closed posture. Study 2 measured differences in gaze behavior based on posture when detecting both low and high stakes lies. Sitting in an open posture reduced visual attention towards senders, and in particular, the attention given to their hands. The findings suggest that simply shifting posture can impact veracity judgments and the way they attend to visual information.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillermo Rodríguez-Martínez ◽  
◽  
Henry Castillo-Parra ◽  
Pedro J. Rosa ◽  
◽  
...  

Introduction: Multisensory audiovisual semantic congruency is the process by which visual information is perceived as integrated to auditory stimuli, because both coincide in terms of simultaneity and semantic correspondence. This study was aimed at establishing whether visual percepts, which semantically correspond to auditory stimuli, are associated with ocular fixations in modulating bottom-up areas while keeping a body posture alignment between the up-direction and the idiotropic axes, as well as in another orientation corresponding to a vectorial opposition between the up-direction and the head idiotropic axis. Method: Two groups (one for each position) were selected from a sample of 88 people. A bistable image was presented on a screen of a fixed 120 Hz eye-tracker device, providing background auditory stimuli so as to establish semantic congruencies and their relations to ocular fixations. Results: It was found that audiovisual semantic congruency is associated with fixations when idiotropic vectors are aligned with the up direction. Fixations manifested in bottom-up modulating areas are not associated with multisensory audiovisual semantic congruency when the head idiotropic vector is parallel with the gravity vector. Eye fixations decrease significantly if the head idiotropic axis is aligned with the gravity vector. Conclusion: It is concluded that body position can affect visual perceptual processes involved in the occurrence of semantic congruency.


Perception ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (12) ◽  
pp. 1412-1426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elmeri Syrjänen ◽  
Marco Tullio Liuzza ◽  
Håkan Fischer ◽  
Jonas K. Olofsson

Disgust is a core emotion evolved to detect and avoid the ingestion of poisonous food as well as the contact with pathogens and other harmful agents. Previous research has shown that multisensory presentation of olfactory and visual information may strengthen the processing of disgust-relevant information. However, it is not known whether these findings extend to dynamic facial stimuli that changes from neutral to emotionally expressive, or if individual differences in trait body odor disgust may influence the processing of disgust-related information. In this preregistered study, we tested whether a classification of dynamic facial expressions as happy or disgusted, and an emotional evaluation of these facial expressions, would be affected by individual differences in body odor disgust sensitivity, and by exposure to a sweat-like, negatively valenced odor (valeric acid), as compared with a soap-like, positively valenced odor (lilac essence) or a no-odor control. Using Bayesian hypothesis testing, we found evidence that odors do not affect recognition of emotion in dynamic faces even when body odor disgust sensitivity was used as moderator. However, an exploratory analysis suggested that an unpleasant odor context may cause faster RTs for faces, independent of their emotional expression. Our results further our understanding of the scope and limits of odor effects on facial perception affect and suggest further studies should focus on reproducibility, specifying experimental circumstances where odor effects on facial expressions may be present versus absent.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Michael Vesker ◽  
Daniela Bahn ◽  
Christina Kauschke ◽  
Gudrun Schwarzer

Abstract Social interactions often require the simultaneous processing of emotions from facial expressions and speech. However, the development of the gaze behavior used for emotion recognition, and the effects of speech perception on the visual encoding of facial expressions is less understood. We therefore conducted a word-primed face categorization experiment, where participants from multiple age groups (six-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and adults) categorized target facial expressions as positive or negative after priming with valence-congruent or -incongruent auditory emotion words, or no words at all. We recorded our participants’ gaze behavior during this task using an eye-tracker, and analyzed the data with respect to the fixation time toward the eyes and mouth regions of faces, as well as the time until participants made the first fixation within those regions (time to first fixation, TTFF). We found that the six-year-olds showed significantly higher accuracy in categorizing congruently primed faces compared to the other conditions. The six-year-olds also showed faster response times, shorter total fixation durations, and faster TTFF measures in all primed trials, regardless of congruency, as compared to unprimed trials. We also found that while adults looked first, and longer, at the eyes as compared to the mouth regions of target faces, children did not exhibit this gaze behavior. Our results thus indicate that young children are more sensitive than adults or older children to auditory emotion word primes during the perception of emotional faces, and that the distribution of gaze across the regions of the face changes significantly from childhood to adulthood.


Author(s):  
Takeshi Ishikawa

This chapter examines the social meaning of deviant mortuary practices from an osteoarchaeological perspective using skeletal remains from the Middle Jomon Period (ca. 3500–2500 cal BC) found at the Kusakari shell mound. The analyses focus on attributes associated with mortuary body treatments: 1) arrangements of remains, 2) body posture and direction, and 3) the location of burials within the cemetery. Although the usual body postures were dorsal during the period, one individual was laid in a prone position with an unusual body direction compared with other burials. The skeletal arrangement also revealed that the individual had been disarticulated early in the postmortem decay process; however, the remains were located within the usual cemetery area. Based on these results and the extraordinary amount of varied faunal remains in the vicinity, the deviant mortuary treatments appeared to arise from a specific social persona rather than an unusual context of death, such as drowning, suicide, warfare, or other cause.


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