The good smile and the bad

How other people’s body language interacts with what we know about their biography

What shapes our first impression upon looking into a person’s face? Humboldt scholarship holder Julia Baum examines how other people’s body language interacts with what we know about them as part of the research group Neurocognitive Psychology of the HU in Adlershof.

Donald Trump looks into the camera with a beaming smile. The US presidential candidate seems friendly, open and optimistic. But only for a naïve observer: many of those watching the septuagenarian billionaire’s speeches have an unpleasant feeling. They have read too much about his lies during the campaign, his bloated ego, and his derogatory remarks about women, immigrants, and homosexuals.

”How we judge people not only depends on their body language. Our impression is also shaped by the emotional knowledge we have about them,” says Julia Baum. Donald Trump, who was ubiquitous during the US presidential election campaign, is a welcome research object for psychologists like Baum. Studies have shown that subjects may perceive other people’s facial expressions as grim or vicious – if they have critical knowledge of them as in Trump’s case - when actually those people are displaying a neutral expression. This effect can be observed in an extreme way in the cases of dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein.

This interaction between the body language our brain receives through the retina of our eyes and our so-called affective knowledge about another person seems banal at first glance. Some psychological schools still hold the assumption that every human is able to decipher what somebody feels, or whether he or she lies or tells the truth, on the basis of tiny mimic messages. “Adherents of this school even offer trainings in order to learn to interpret such messages,” says Baum. “However, they neglect the influence of pre-existing knowledge of another person completely.”

It is this influence that the 29-year-old aims at examining: in test series with voluntary research subjects, Baum and her colleagues use electroencephalography (EEG) to measure what happens in a brain upon looking at a face. A first impression is formed after only 200 milliseconds and after 400 milliseconds an elaborate process is triggered. The researchers’ key questions are how the impression is shaped by visual information and how crucial learned knowledge is. This is measured by showing the subjects unknown faces in connection with brief biographical information.

“We were able to show that a face and facial expressions were rated more positively if the additional information made that person seem likeable,” explains Baum. The cognitive psychologist is aiming at gaining a better understanding of the interaction of first impressions, biographical knowledge and emotions in her dissertation. How does the impression of a certain person develop over time? Are these opinions of another person rigid or revisable? It is questions like these that the young researcher deals with, whose research in preparation of her dissertation is sponsored by the Humboldt Research Track, a grant which was created by the German Universities Excellence Initiative. Baum is now thinking about how she has to design the tests in order to get valid answers to her many questions. She sees her work in the context of the flood of information created by the internet and new media which affect people in an “intensely emotional” way and at a very high speed. They also tended to fuel the panic as in the case of, for example, the spree killing in Munich. “We rely heavily on our judgement and our ability to ‘read’ faces. I find it intriguing to investigate something that seems very obvious to us to better understand how human judgement actually works.”

By Claudia Wessling for Adlershof Journal