Psychology: Exploring the Relations of Micro Expression to Professional Performance
Psychology: Exploring the Relations of Micro Expression to Professional Performance
According to the studies conducted by Albert Mehrabian in 1971, in communication process, around 93% of human communication takes place through non-verbal mode. He divided the communication process into three parts; words (7%), tone of the voice (38%), and body language 55% (Mehrabian, 1981). Among non-verbal modes of communication the commonly used mode is the facial expressions. The face of the person expresses his/her emotions. Yet, some part of emotions is sometimes not clear to everyone. We all are not experts in identifying each and every expression of the person. There is a subtle expressions given by the person are sometimes cannot be comprehended easily. Everyone is not the master in understanding these subtle expressions, which are known as micro expressions. According to the study of Chavali et.al., (2014) only highly trained people can distinguish the micro expressions and the accuracy level among them is also only 47% The topic has been studied by different scholars with different perceptions. According to Ekman (2009) micro expressions are like “flashes on and off the face in less than one quarter of a second.” The face gives abundant information about human emotions. Gogia and Liu (2014) state that micro expressions are although subtle, they indicate true emotional response. They further clarify it that the response is too subtle to perceive (Gogia and Liu, 2014).
Extensive knowledge of micro expression has become crucial while handling the human resource in corporate world. The ability to detect micro expressions helps the person to predict what exactly is going on in the person’s mind. The micro-expression training programs are frequently conducted in corporate world. Government agencies, Fortune 500 companies and even educational and medical practitioners are using micro expression technique. This program helps the people to read and understand the people easily and thus to deal with them successfully. In the business organization, if there is a team of people with the thorough knowledge of the reading the subtle emotions of the people, it will make positive impact on the company’s performance. That is why the importance and the trend of the training in micro-expression training program are increasing.
One more facet that directly links with the micro expression is the Emotional Intelligence (EI). While taking the support from Stubbs Koman and Wolff’s study, Nermend and Latuszynska (2016) also put forward the idea of the link between micro expressions and EI. They state that the EI helps individuals become competent in communication skills, thereby expanding their micro expression ability
Keywords: Micro expressions, professional performance, Emotional Intelligence
What is micro expression?: Definition and Elaboration
The Micro Expression theory was first used by Darwin and century after that Haggard & Isaacs (1966) put it forward in detail. Micro expressions according to Zhang, Chen and Fu (2014) are extremely quick facial expressions that are often embedded in a flow of emotional expression. Micro expressions are brief expression, lasting only a fraction of a second ("Micro Expressions | Facial Expressions | Paul Ekman Group", n.d.). Micro expressions tell us that the emotions are concealed, but they do not tell you how and why it was concealed.
The above definitions of micro expression explain the following characteristics of micro expressions.
The micro expressions are quick expressions that last for few minutes and they are always accompanied by the flow of emotions.
Micro expressions can be repeated and they relate to the person’s sound and what is said by the person.
While conducting the thorough study of micro expressions and facial expression, Friesen (1972), who documented that the facial expressions are spontaneous. Matsumoto et.al.(2008) also support the spontaneity of the facial expressions. Micro expressions according to Porter & Blink (2008) occurred when individual attempts to be deceitful about the emotional expressions. Emotions accompanied by micro expressions play a crucial role in the process of detecting lies
The role of micro-expression recognition in human relationship:
The personal and professional success of any individual depends upon some of the important factors. One of them is interpersonal skills. The strong relationship among the people can develop only through effective relationship and micro-expressions play a crucial role in effective communication and building relationship. It is because for the development of interpersonal relationship, the foremost thing is to know the person. The interpersonal skills are very important for climbing the ladder of the success (Levin, 2010). For knowing the person, it is important to know his/her emotions. For knowing the emotions, human face is the major way to reach to his/her emotions. The face reflects each moment change and fluctuation of emotions going on in the mind of the person. When the person learns to read the micro expressions, it will help him to understand the feelings of the others. The skill in reading the micro expressions can also help the person to know his/her own feelings and it helps them to be retrospective.
Human interaction is not possible without the existence of emotions. The common expressions are not sufficient to understand the person’s feelings in detail. The micro-expressions make it easy not to know the person’s emotions but feel them. The reading capacity of micro expression makes the person sensitive about the person and the overall things happening around us. The proper training of micro expression recognition can improve emotional sensitivity (Frank et.al. 2009)
When the person is hiding some emotions, they cannot be hidden completely. They are somewhere blinking on the face like a flash. But they are so quick and with fraction of seconds that not everyone recognizes it. For recognizing them the proper skill needs to be developed. Micro expression recognition skill helps to locate the concealed emotions of the person.
Naturally when even the subtle emotions are revealed, it becomes easy to interact with the person making him more comfortable. The micro emotion recognition thus helps to establish good rapport among the people as they are aware of the emotions of others. A strong human relationship is built due to the ability of recognizing micro-emotions.
The understanding of others’ emotions helps the person understand his/her own emotions. The recognition of micro-emotions facilitates to improve one’s own emotions. The recognition of emotions is only possible when the person himself/herself is emotionally triggered.
The positive result of understanding the other’s and own emotions is that the person is able to develop the social skills. The research conducted by Ekman (2009) helps to treat the schizophrenic patients.
Role of Micro expression Recognition in Professional Performance and enhancing EI
Professional performance is majorly counted by the interpersonal relationship of the individual. In the wave of globalization, sustaining and making progress in the cut-throat competitive environment has been very challenging. In such situation, even the minute skills of the person matter a lot. The company’s performance depends upon the interpersonal skills and good communication. According to Fagliand (2014) employers should be very sensitive towards his employees while dealing with the organizational processes such as hiring, firing, promoting and demoting as well. He states that handling emotions of the employees in such situation is very crucial (Fagliand, 2014). He further says that the emotional level of the employees can reach high due to the sudden changes in his career. Recognition of Micro expression helps the employers to handle such high-stake situations properly (Fagliand, 2014). The effective recognition of micro expressions helps the person to be a good manager and a good leader as well. It is a useful skills for business executives ("Micro Expressions | Facial Expressions | Paul Ekman Group", n.d.). In the business scenario, many times people do not say what exactly is in their minds. It helps to decrease the tension among the people of the organization and consequently the performance gets increased. The micro expression can help the people in a range of professions to develop their skills in reading the emotions of the people. It helps to build trust and collegiality (Matsumoto & Hwang, 2011)
The micro expression recognition also helps to develop Emotional Intelligence (EI) of the person. It is very essential in the successful human interaction. A research conducted by Goleman was published in Harvard Business Review. Through his research, he discovered that every single person trained seriously with micro expression training increased their emotional intelligence with an average of 10% ("How to Increase your EQ by 10% in 4 hours | Micro Expressions Training", n.d.).
The performance of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the company depends upon various factors and micro expressions recognition is one of the factors. Goldfarb, the CIO of auditing firm PRG-Schultz International states that the CIO’s basic responsibilities consist of selling things and ideas, budget. Recognizing micro emotions can help to understand the tensions and disputes among the people.
Ekman’s website claims that the micro expression recognition training program is used by the branches of US government agencies, Fortune Five Hundred companies and the Medical Professionals. In short, the skill development program in micro expression recognition can be used by the salespersons, executives, communicators to enhance their professional performance that leads to their success in their respective business.
Methods of Testing Micro expression Recognition
Detecting Micro Expressions are very hard and challenging according to Song (2013) as the emotional stimuli last only few seconds. Local space-time features decipher and sparse representation of image features are used to capture micro expressions (Olshausen & Fieldt, 1997) METT & SETT are the training tools or methods for testing the ability of micro expression recognition. These methods not only help to recognize the micro emotions of the person, but they also help to respond to those micro emotions. A common method described by Song et.al. (2013) is to extract different feature descriptor from face (action unit) and body (joint position) and concentrate them into a single feature vector. There is an automatic human emotion analysis that aims at inferring the emotional state of a human from these modalities using techniques in various disciplines. It includes audio signal processing, speech understanding, computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning (Zhihong Zeng, Pantic, Roisman & Huang, 2009)
The Aim of the Research
The present paper aims at exploring the relation of micro expression recognition to professional performance. The study focuses on particularly sales professionals, executives, CEOs, managers who one daily basis need interaction with the people around them for their business.
As mentioned above micro expression recognition is closely associated with emotional intelligence as well. The EI is also studied in the paper in context with professional performance.
Some major studies have provided evidence that micro expression recognition relates to emotional intelligence as well as interpersonal skills. The first new aspect of this research project is the validation of the role of skills of micro expression recognition in professional performance that need emotional intelligence skills
The second aim of the study is a validation of a new tool of Micro Expression Recognition (METV) that is based on short movies (dynamic facial expression exposure) in contrast to traditional tool developed by Ekman (METT). This tool is based on static picture.
CHAPTER 2
The Research Project
The research project of the research aims at exploring the connection of micro expression to professional performance of the individual. Furthermore the research is based on finding out the role of micro expression recognition skill in inculcating the emotional intelligence among the professionals. The present research is based on the quantitative analysis of the main tests based on videos and computers. It was a lab research where the participants were given the task and through the task their emotions were carefully monitored with the help of modern equipment. The primary data was thus collected through the quantified analysis of the test.
During the research, the focused area was to monitor and measure the micro expressions of the participants. The participants were further trained with micro expression recognition technique and their performance was evaluated. It was a two ways study. Micro expression recognition technique can be used by the professionals such as doctors, sales person, marketing persons and executives to enhance their performance. At the same time, the performance of the professionals like Barak Obama and Romney was evaluated through the micro expressions of the people as well. The research report was prepared with the help of micro expressions displayed by the people while watching the video of Obama and Romney. The report was also prepared with the help of two different tests METT and METV. On the basis of the reports, the results are obtained.
The title of the research Exploring the Relation of Micro Expression to Professional Performance indicates that the research focuses on the successful and effective use of micro expression recognition skills and its importance especially in the professional performance of the person. The companies are always keen to experiment different technique for the consistent good performance of their employees. For gaining positive results from the employees, they always try new and innovative projects. The continuous development of the employees and their ability of adapting things according to the changing scenario of the corporate world has always been the major concern for the employers. For that the companies conducted training program. Micro expression recognition program is among such program that aims to develop the employees’ skill in understanding the micro expressions of the person whom they are dealing with and giving appropriate and positive response to those expressions. The title of the research is based on the hypothesis that the micro expression recognition training is very effective in developing the interpersonal skills of the people on various levels and hierarchy of the organization.
Definition of Key Words:
The key words of the present research paper are micro expressions, professional performance and Emotional Intelligence
Micro Expression: Micro expressions are very brief facial expressions that appear on the face for a fraction of seconds. They appear on the face when the person is hiding his/her feeling from the people. There are seven common micro emotions; anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, surprise and happiness.
Professional performance: Professional performance is defined as the person’s quality of work that is done to receive payment. The task involved in professional performance is creative and intellectually challenging as well. The advance computer technology is used for the traditional jobs of book keeping, accounting, documenting etc. The traditional idea of stable job has also been changed (Ericsson, 2009). In the changing environment, the person has to give the best of his/her technical knowhow and other skills as well. The ongoing adaptation of the employees has become the need of today’s competitive environment. The performance thus can be defined as a consistent growth adaptation and quality work of the employees for the sustainable growth of the organization.
METT: This keyword is an abbreviation of Micro Expression Testing Tool. The technique is used to test the micro expressions of the person.
METV: The keyword METV is an abbreviation of Micro Expression Testing Videos. This is also the visual form of testing the micro expressions of the person.
Emotional Intelligence (EI): Emotional Intelligence is the ability of the person to recognize his/her own and others’ emotions discriminate them and label them appropriately and to use emotional information to guide his thoughts and behavior.
Method
The first step of the research method was to find out the dependent and independent variables. The dependent variable is the professional performance of the employees and the independent variable is the micro expression recognition.
Being the psychology research, the following methods are used for this research;
Lab Experiment: The participants were gathered in a controlled environment to show videos. They were experimented with some tests in the constrained place. Hence the accurate measurements were possible. The pilot study was also conducted by selecting few people and conducting tests according to the designed procedure.
The present research paper contains two main methods of research; qualitative method and quantitative method. The lab tests are basically included and the results are obtained from quantitative and statistical analysis. Moreover the research method is also determined by the type of data; whether the information is collected from primary source or secondary source.
In the present research paper both data is collected from both primary and secondary sources. For secondary sources the data is collected from the books, articles, journals and websites. For primary data the researcher relied on the participants.
A Research Report of the interview of Obama and Romney
The conducted study was based on the micro expressions of the viewers while watching the videos of the election campaign of President Obama and his rival Romney. The first finding was based on the question whether there is any correlation between emotion surprised and scared. It was found that the emotion surprised is correlating with the emotion scared.
In the second experiment the correlation between engagement and emotions were tested. It was found that strongest correlation of engagement found in the happy emotions, followed by surprise. The less correlation of engagement found with sad (0.268**) followed by disgust (0,288**).
The viewers were most of the time happy and surprised while watching the video. The dominating emotions were happy and surprised. The test further compared these emotions of two leaders. It was a comparative analysis and it was found that the viewers showed happy emotions more to Romney (181) than Obama (130); while Obama received surprised (143)emotions than his opponent Romney (133). The disgusting emotions were also compared between these leaders and it was found that the disgusting moment was prominent for Romney than Obama.
The two emotions were prominent for both of the candidates and those were Happy and Surprised. The disgusting emotions were found more for Romney (44) than Obama (29). From the report, it was also found that the reaction of anger was less in Obama’s case than that of Romney. Further, it was found that when the participants were watching the videos, level of involvement was very high with Obama as well as Romney.
The result of the videos also shows that as compared to Romney, Obama receives greater level of reaction “scared”. It meant that Romney succeeded in gaining confidence among the audience on higher level than Obama. In the first part of the video Obama had a more positive response of valence, while in the second part of the video Romney had a more positive response.
Total Research Report
The pilot studies show that people on average receive a higher score in the test METT than in the test METV. The study was attended by 62 people - students of psychology UW 1 or 2 years of study. The subjects for the first time encountered the test METV. They were divided into two groups: the first was first put to the test METT then METV and the other in the first place was tested to METV then METT. Each of the participants in the test completed two tests, one after another.
Correlation between the Result of the METT & METV & the Reliability of the Test
The aim of the study is to determine the reliability of the test micro-expression recognition METV in comparison with the results obtained in the test METT. The research question was therefore the research question for this part can be formulated as follows:
Can the results obtained from METT determine the reliability of the Micro expression Recognition METV?
The dependent variable will be the reliability of the test while the independent variable is the METT and METV tests.
The main hypothesis was In the test 42 people METV the result low, and 14 people received high score, while in the test METT 38 persons were the result of high and low result 18 people. Of those who received low score in the test METV, 40% were also low score in the test METT. Of those who received a high score METV, 93% achieved a high score METT.
The result of the recognition test micro expression METT positively correlates with the recognition test micro expression METV, persons with high results of one test usually have too high score in the second test, however, is not always the low results in one of the test results are low in the second test. In addition, the test results identifying micro expression METT are on average much higher than the results of the test micro-expression recognition METV. There was also an effect of learning in the form of higher average performance in the second test: Result METV in the first trial is slightly lower than the result METV in the second test, and the result METT in the first trial is slightly lower than the result METT in the second test. So we can say that people who have a better result in the recognition test micro expression METT are also higher score in the test METV, which means that also confirmed the hypothesis index.
METV &Emotional Intelligence Test
The hypothesis for this test is that the individuals who secure high score in the tests of Emotional Intelligence can perform better in social relationships. They are more empathetic and self-conscious and score high in METV tests.
For this study the participants were divided into two different groups. The sequence of the test was changed. The first group was tested METT first and then METV. The opposite procedure was done with the second group. The second group was tested METV first and then METT. After that the emotional intelligence was tested. No satisfactory significant correlation was found in the result. So the above mentioned hypothesis was not confirmed. Moreover, there is also no significant statistical correlation between the results of METV and PKIE. People with a high result in the recognition test micro expression METV will have a high score in the test of emotional intelligence and people with low result in the recognition test micro expression METV will have a low score in the test of emotional intelligence have not been confirmed.
Second hypothesis in this area was that there is any relationship between the level of emotional intelligence and the ability to recognize micro expression using the test METV. The participants were imparted training to assess their non-verbal ability. The results before training and after training were tested. It was found that there is no significant difference between the ability before training and after training. There is no progress found in the statistical t-test. So here also the second hypothesis is not confirmed. The person in METV trained could not show higher results in the test of EI MSCEIT before training.
METV & Sales Performance
The hypothesis to prove the correlation between METV and the Sales performance was the ability to identify micro expressions will increase the performance in the sale. The dependent variable in this research is increased performance in sales and the independent variable is the micro expression recognition skill.
The study to show the correlation between sales performance and METV was conducted in which 82 retailers and officers were involved. There is a positive correlation between the results achieved by sales and result METV. The better sales results the higher the score METV.
The average test result METV among the top 20 vendors amounted to about 26, and a group of 20 worst about 16. The difference is therefore considerable. Certainly hypothesis: The first 20 people who have achieved the best result sales are significantly higher than the average score METV group of 20 people with the lowest average score of METV be confirmed.
There is also a positive correlation found between the results of sales and the score in METV score. The people with high sales results achieved high score in METV. It is also found that the people who have above-average sales performance (above average) achieved a high score METV; persons who have attained the result of below-average test METV have significantly lower sales results than those who have achieved above-average results in the test METV. The result clearly confirmed the hypothesis that the sales people who are competent in micro expression recognition skill can be the good sales person. They can read the people’s emotions and respond it in a constructive way; in such a way that the person should be convinced. Hence in this study the hypothesis was confirmed.
Age can affect the Micro Expression Recognition Skill
The hypothesis for this research area was whether the age factor affects the level of micro expression recognition skills. The dependent variable is the age factor and the independent variable is micro expression recognition skills. The research also found that the vast majority of parents achieve lower scores in the recognition test micro expression METV than their children.
There is no correlation between age and the average score in the test Closness in a group of 41 people, among which the difference between the pre and post test was the biggest test.
The test METV post -test and the average METV are much higher among respondents who had undergone training METV than in the control group.
Results
American President Barak Obama and his political rival Romney were tested through the micro expressions of the audience. The relations of micro expressions on Obama’s and Romney’s performance were tested through the video. Romney received positive response of valence than Obama from the viewers. The maximum emotions they received from the viewers are happy and surprise followed by fear, anger and disgust.
Along with the video test the two tests were conducted; they were METT & METV tests. People who have a better result in the recognition test micro expression METT are also higher score in the test METV. The one seriously approached the training and took part in more tests it obtained a better learning outcome. The MSCEUT test is effective to recognize the micro expression. Through the test it was found that the person with better ability to identify the micro-expression, has a higher level of emotional intelligence especially in the field of non-verbal abilities.
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