Mark Frank

University at Buffalo, State University of New York | SUNY Buffalo

Meta-analyses have not shown emotions to be significant predictors of deception. Criticisms of this conclusion argued that individuals must be engaged with each other in higher stake situations for such emotions to manifest, and that these emotions must be evaluated in their verbal context (Frank and Svetieva in J Appl Res Memory Cognit 1:131–133,...

Nonverbal communication plays an instrumental role in the process of meeting someone in a potential romantic encounter, starting from determining if they are attractive, if they are interested in a relationship with us, and whether we would be compatible. In this chapter we highlight not just the nonverbal signs and signals of attraction, but attem...

The relative and combined effectiveness of verbal versus nonverbal techniques in eliciting rapport during interviews is unknown. The effectiveness of one verbal and one nonverbal behavioral technique presumed to be associated with rapport-building were compared to determine if either or both could influence participants to disclose more personal in...

In this article, we present a database of multimodal communication features extracted from debate speeches in the 2019 North American Universities Debate Championships (NAUDC). Feature sets were extracted from the visual (facial expression, gaze, and head pose), audio (PRAAT), and textual (word sentiment and linguistic category) modalities of raw v...

In this work, we present a database of multimodal communication features extracted from debate speeches in the 2019 North American Universities Debate Championships (NAUDC). Feature sets were extracted from the visual (facial expression, gaze, and head pose), audio (PRAAT), and textual (word sentiment and linguistic category) modalities of raw vide...

One aspect of social intelligence is the ability to identify when others are being deceptive. It would seem that individuals who were bestowed with such an ability to recognize honest signals of emotion, particularly when attempts to suppress them are made, would have a reproductive advantage over others without it. Yet the research literature sugg...

Some cultures rely heavily on visual channels for gathering information. One specific group is the Deaf and hard of hearing community who often rely on signed languages to communicate. Language and thought are woven, therefore this study examined whether bicultural-bilingual schemas can be activated via the visual channel. A sample from a Deaf comm...

Previous research suggested that real-world lies are detected through hard evidence, such as physical evidence or a direct confession, and not via nonverbal clues. However, we argue that discovering a lie is a process, and nonverbal clues are an important source of information that can induce suspicion, which then triggers the search for hard evide...

The traditional paradigm of emotion research has long been concerned with the source of emotion recognition and whether it is primarily universal, driven by evolutionary forces, or cultural, learned like language. Recent findings challenge the notion that facial expressions are universal based on recognition accuracy rates for Asian versus Caucasia...

Previous research has suggested an important role for the emotion of hatred in intergroup aggression. Recent theoretical and empirical work has strongly suggested that the combination of anger, contempt, and disgust (ANCODI) comprise the basic elements of hatred, and are the key emotions associated with intergroup aggression. No study, however, has...

The traditional paradigm of emotion research has long been concerned with the source of emotion recognition and whether it is primarily universal, driven by evolutionary forces, or cultural, learned like language. Recent findings challenge the notion that facial expressions are universal based on recognition accuracy rates for Asian versus Caucasia...

The present study examined empathy and emotion dysregulation, two individual traits related to the perception and experience of others’ emotions, and the recognition of both spontaneous and standardized microexpressions of emotion. Ninety-three participants viewed a stimulus set of natural (spontaneous) microexpressions in addition to completing a...

Recent studies have suggested that the combination of the emotions anger-contempt-disgust (ANCODI) is associated with intergroup hostility. This study examined if incidental elicitation of this emotion combination causally produces hostile cognitions, language, and behaviors. Members of political groups were primed with either ANCODI, fear+sadness,...

Although nonverbal and verbal behaviors have been studied as potential cues to deception for decades, there is evidence that in real-world scenarios people report more non-behavioral (e.g. physical evidence) than behavioral cues when asked to recall how they discovered a lie. The current study re-examines this process by which a lie is detected by...

The primary objective of this effort is to employ a high fidelity simulator for a small pilot study to assess the impact of internal distractions on traffic safety. While all vehicle distractions have the potential to endanger driver, passenger, and bystander safety, distractions internal to the driver (i.e., mindlessness, being lost-in-thought, mi...

Emotions can drive intergroup behavior, including intergroup violence. We propose that anger, contempt, and disgust (ANCODI) work together in combination to motivate action, devaluation of the other group, and then elimination of their members. We tested the ANCODI hypothesis by examining speeches given by leaders of extreme political groups prior...

There has been much interest in microexpressions and deception with the advent of recent popular television programs touting their abilities to predict deception. The research picture is considerably more complicated, but at the same time considerably more straight forward. Microexpressions are brief in duration facial expressions of emotion. They...

The human voice is capable of making a wide variety of sounds. From a psychological point of view, what is interesting is that only some configurations of sounds are meaningful to others. There are the words we choose, which are combinations of sounds that symbolically represent various concepts we are trying to communicate. But even those sounds t...

Micro expressions are brief facial expressions displayed when people attempt to conceal, hide, or repress their emotions. They are difficult to detect in real time, yet individuals who can accurately identify micro expressions receive higher workplace evaluations and can better detect deception. Two studies featuring college students and security o...

In highly social species such as humans, faces have evolved to convey rich information for social interaction, including expressions of emotions and pain [1-3]. Two motor pathways control facial movement [4-7]: a subcortical extrapyramidal motor system drives spontaneous facial expressions of felt emotions, and a cortical pyramidal motor system con...

The primary purpose of the current study is to explore whether emotional-display behavior varies on different forms of CMC in a context of one-to-one online chat. Eighty college students (40 males and 40 females) participated in this experiment, and participants were randomly and equally assigned to one of the four different chat conditions (i.e.,...

We examined how leaders' expressions of emotion and emotion-related appraisals in their speeches were associated with subsequent political aggression by their groups. We obtained records of speeches anchored to identified acts of aggression and selected for analysis those speeches that were available at three points in time prior to those acts. We...

Matsumoto, Hwang, and Frank [2012a. Emotions expressed in speeches by leaders of ideologically motivated groups predict aggression. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression. doi:10.1080/19434472.2012.716449] provided evidence that the verbal expression of anger, contempt, and disgust by leaders of ideologically motivated groups whe...

Anger, contempt, and disgust are emotions associated with violations of ethics and morality, and recent theoretical work has suggested that they are important drivers of group-based aggression and violence. We test this hypothesis by examining the emotions expressed by leaders of ideologically motivated groups when speaking about outgroups they opp...

Highlights ► We argue that dismissing emotional clues to deception is premature. ► We show the existing research data shows strong emotion link in high motivation deception studies. ► We argue efforts to enhance cognitive clues to deception are important but have not yielded results stronger than emotion. ► We agree that the interaction between lia...

We examined whether training in both the verbal and nonverbal indicators of truth telling and lying would have positive effects on Law Enforcement Officers’ (LEOs) ability to evaluate truths from lies. College course-level training on empirically validated verbal and nonverbal indicators of truth telling and lying was provided to mid- to advanced-c...

Nonverbal Communication: Science and Applications Nonverbal communication: Science and applications David Matsumoto San Francisco State University and Humintell, LLC Mark G. Frank University at Buffalo, State University of New York Hyi Sung Hwang San Francisco State University and Humintell, LLC SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oak...

Deception There is no shortage of hints, tips, and suggestions in magazines, newspapers, and general-public books about secret “telltale” signs of deception. Many television programs feature characters that can detect lies rapidly and accurately based solely on nonverbal behavior. The reason for this popularity is easy to see. Most people would lov...

Behavioral countermeasures are the strategies engaged by liars to deliberately control face or body behavior to fool lie catchers. To date research has not shown whether deceivers can suppress elements of their facial expression as a behavioral countermeasure. This study examined whether participants could suppress facial actions such as eyebrow mo...

Inspired by the the behavioral scientific discoveries of Dr. Paul Ekman in relation to deceit detection, along with the television drama series Lie to Me, also based on Dr. Ekman's work, we use machine learning techniques to study the underlying phenomena expressed when a person tells a lie. We build an automated framework which detects deceit by m...

We present the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox (CERT), a software tool for fully automatic real-time facial expression recognition, and officially release it for free academic use. CERT can automatically code the intensity of 19 different facial actions from the Facial Action Unit Coding System (FACS) and 6 different protoypical facial expr...

Our review of the research on lie detection accuracy in the forensic context supports the view that some law enforcement professionals are highly expert lie detectors, but only if their abilities are assessed with appropriate materials. We identify other problems in the existing literature, and discuss recent advances in studying how law enforcemen...

In this paper we present a prototype for an automated deception detection system. Similar to polygraph examinations, we attempt to take advantage of the theory that false answers will produce distinctive measurements in certain physiological manifestations. We investigate the role of dynamic eye-based features such as eye closure/blinking and later...

Although technology has a vital role to play in the detection of potential terrorists, human lie detectors are also important in follow-up interviews and in situations where technology is not useable. Over the last ten years, researchers have become more sophisticated in designing experimental scenarios for use in lie detection research. In additio...

Although most people are not better than chance in detecting deception, some groups of police professionals have demonstrated significant lie detection accuracy. One reason for this difference may be that the types of lies police are asked to judge in scientific experiments often do not represent the types of lies they see in their profession. Acro...

Reports an error in "Police lie detection accuracy: The effect of lie scenario" by Maureen O’Sullivan, Mark G. Frank, Carolyn M. Hurley and Jaspreet Tiwana ( Law and Human Behavior , 2009 [Dec], Vol 33[6], 530-538). In the original article the target designated in Table 1 for reference 20 (Bond, 2008) is incorrect. The targets were paroled felons n...

This chapter presents an approach for developing a fully automatic Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The approach uses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that can be applied to recognition of any facial action. The results of Study I provided guidance as to which image representations, or feature extraction methods, are most effective f...

Bond (2008) objects to the attention given to two of our publications on lie detection accuracy because of what he suggests is incompetence in one case and suppression of data in the other. It is our opinion that his claims are based principally on a tortured re-interpretation of a manuscript we attempted to publish that he has kept in his possessi...

Human intelligence is the key to stopping terrorism, and therefore it is essential to know when the information obtained is false. This article briefly outlines the research on behavioral clues to deception, as well as research on people’s abilities to spot deception once it has happened. We find that there is no clue or clue pattern that is specif...

The methodology involved in nonverbal deception research has recently come under scrutiny due to the importance of catching liars in real-world counter-terrorism efforts. This chapter examines the pros and cons associated with the design of a deception scenario, particularly in terms of ecological validity, the execution of the scenario, as well as...

Previous work has demonstrated the correlation of increased blood perfusion in the orbital muscles and stress levels for human beings. It has also been suggested that this periorbital perfusion can be quantified through the processing of thermal video. The idea has been based on the fact that skin temperature is heavily modulated by superficial blo...

Spontaneous facial expressions differ from posed expressions in both which muscles are moved, and in the dynamics of the movement. Advances in the field of automatic facial expression measurement will require development and assessment on spontaneous behavior. Here we present preliminary results on a task of facial action detection in spontaneous f...

We present results on a user independent fully automatic system for real time recognition of facial actions from the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The system automatically detects frontal faces in the video stream and codes each frame with respect to 20 Action units. We present preliminary results on a task of facial action detection in spont...

For many years the Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research (Scherer & Ekman, 1982) has been an invaluable text for researchers looking for methods to study nonverbal behavior and the expression of affect. A successor to this essential text, The New Handbook of Methods in Nonverbal Behavior Research is a substantially updated volume with...

Previous work has demonstrated the correlation of periorbital perfusion and stress levels in human beings. In this paper, we report results on a large and realistic mock-crime interrogation experiment. The interrogation is free flowing and no restrictions have been placed on the subjects. We propose a new methodology to compute the average periorbi...

We present a systematic comparison of machine learning methods applied to the problem of fully automatic recognition of facial expressions. We report results on a series of experiments comparing recognition engines, including AdaBoost, support vector machines, linear discriminant analysis. We also explored feature selection techniques, including th...

Previous work has demonstrated the correlation of periorbital perfusion and stress levels in human beings. It has also been suggested that periorbital perfusion can be quantified through processing of thermal video. The idea has been based on the fact that skin temperature is heavily modulated by superficial blood perfusion. Proof of this concept w...

Police interviews try to obtain a narrative of what was observed by witnesses, victims or suspects. Yet there is considerable debate about the most appropriate interview style, the best strategies to use, and the characteristics of interviewers or interviewees that yield the most useful information. Police interviews are integral to criminal invest...

This chapter focuses on different types of lies that eye witnesses can use before the jury, while examining the importance of identifying nonverbal detection of deception in forensic contexts. Lies can occur in many different forms, from outright fabrication, denial, distortion, evasion, and concealment, to even telling the truth falsely. Similar t...

The authors investigated whether the ability to appear truthful is specific to deception situations. Male participants were interrogated after they took part in 2 high-stake deception situations, one involving a mock crime and another involving a false opinion. The videotaped interrogations from each situation were shown to independent groups of un...

We examined accuracy in detecting the truths and lies of 10 videotaped students who offered their opinions on the death penalty or smoking in public. Student lie detectors were randomly assigned to either the individual condition, where they reported their veracity judgments and confidence independently, or the small group condition, where they rec...

Can we train people to detect deception? It is the contention of this article that communication scholars should learn how to train law enforcement professionals on how to detect high stake lies, like those faced by police, judges, customs officials, immigration officials, and so forth. It is proposed that in order to know whether we can train or s...

The moment the patient/client walks in the door a wide variety of information about this patient becomes available to the clinician or Health Care Provider (from here abbreviated to HCP). Not only is written information on the charts or notes about past history available to the HCP, but there is visual information in the clothing of the patient tha...

The psychological literature suggests that establishing rapport between interviewer and subject -- whether in clinical, experimental or forensic settings -- is likely to enhance the quality of the interaction. Yet there are surprisingly few studies that test this assumption. This article reports a study of the effect of rapport on eyewitness recall...

The psychological literature suggests that establishing rapport between interviewer and subject – whether in clinical, experimental or forensic settings – is likely to enhance the quality of the interaction. Yet there are surprisingly few studies that test this assumption. This article reports a study of the effect of rapport on eyewitness recall o...

Discusses some of the questions relevant to the role of smiles when lying. For example, to what extent are smiles valid clues to lying? If they are valid, under what circumstances are they valid? If they are not valid clues to lying, then why are they not? In the course of reviewing the research on smiles and deception, topics touched upon in this...

The view that certain facial expressions of emotion are universally agreed on has been challenged by studies showing that the forced-choice paradigm may have artificially forced agreement. This article addressed this methodological criticism by offering participants the opportunity to select a none of these terms are correct option from a list of e...

The view that certain facial expressions of emotion are universally agreed on has been challenged by studies showing that the forced-choice paradigm may have artificially forced agreement. This article addressed this methodological criticism by offering participants the opportunity to select a none of these terms are correct option from a list of e...

People are usually no better than chance at detecting lies from a liar's demeanour, even when clues to deceit are evident from facial expression and tone of voice. We suspected that people who are unable to understand words (aphasics) may be better at spotting liars, so we tested their performance as lie detectors. We found that aphasics were signi...

Research suggests that most people cannot tell from demeanor when others are lying. Such poor performance is typical not only of laypeople but also of most professionals concerned with lying. In this study, three professional groups with special interest or skill in deception, two law-enforcement groups and a select group of clinical psychologists,...

Facial images can be enhanced by application of an algorithm--the caricature algorithm--that systematically manipulates their distinctiveness (Benson & Perrett, 1991c; Brennan, 1985). In this study, we first produced a composite facial image from natural images of the six facial expressions of fear, sadness, surprise, happiness, disgust, and anger...

Facial expressions convey a vast amount of information, but only recently have investigators begun to explore the precise details of what expressions are telling us about internal states, social behavior, and psychopathology. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which is a tool for comprehensively measuring facial expressions, plays a central ro...

The authors investigated whether accuracy in identifying deception from demeanor in high-stake lies is specific to those lies or generalizes to other high-stake lies. In Experiment 1, 48 observers judged whether 2 different groups of men were telling lies about a mock theft (crime scenario) or about their opinion (opinion scenario). The authors fou...

The authors investigated whether accuracy in identifying deception from demeanor in high-stake lies is specific to those lies or generalizes to other high-stake lies. In Experiment 1, 48 observers judged whether 2 different groups of men were telling lies about a mock theft (crime scenario) or about their opinion (opinion scenario). The authors fou...

Ekman and Friesen (1982) predicted that smiles that express enjoyment would be marked by smoother zygomatic major actions of more consistent duration than the zygomatic major actions of nonenjoyment smiles. Study 1 measured the duration and smoothness of smiles shown by female subjects in response to positive emotion films while alone and in a soci...

Two studies examined whether people's retrospective causal attributions might be mediated by the visual perspective from which events are recalled. In Study 1, pairs of Ss participated in "get-acquainted" conversations and made a series of attribution ratings for their performance. They returned 3 weeks later to rerate their performance on the same...

Two studies examined whether people's retrospective causal attributions might be mediated by the visual perspective from which events are recalled. In Study 1, pairs of Ss participated in “get-acquainted” conversations and made a series of attribution ratings for their performance. They returned 3 weeks later to rerate their performance on the same...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, Jan., 1989. Includes bibliographical references.

Black is viewed as the color of evil and death in virtually all cultures. With this association in mind, we were interested in whether a cue as subtle as the color of a person's clothing might have a significant impact on his or her behavior. To test this possibility, we examined whether professional football and ice hockey teams that wear black un...

Two systems for capturing and analyzing automatically facial expressions are evaluated and compared. The systems, developed by interdisciplinary research teams at CMU/Pitt and UCSD/Salk, are the first attempt at automatically analyzing spontaneous facial expressions with unconstrained head orientation. The training and test sequences where acquired...