Blue’s Clues and the Facial Action Coding System

“Stickiness”Blue’s Clues

How are “Sesame Street” and “Blue’s Clues” different?

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS)Even thoughts and emotions can be empirically studied through an

anatomical analysis of facial action (psychologist Paul Ekman).

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS)• Margaret Mead and others argued that expression was culturally determined

—that we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions (“nurture”).

But when Paul Ekman went to the jungles of Papa New Guinea, he found that the tribesmen there had no problem interpreting his expressions (they’re universal).

• So Ekman created a taxonomy of approximately 3,000 facial expressions, including microexpressions that give away our thoughts and emotions = FACS.

e.g., Bill Clinton, police officers/S.Service, abused children

French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne and our “involuntary expressive system”

When we experience a basic emotion, a corresponding message is automatically sent to the muscles of the face. That message may linger on the face for just a fraction of second, or be detectable only if you attached electrical sensors to the face, BUT it’s always there.

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” and Thin Slicing

Our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of many situations and to process the extraordinary amount of data we are

constantly processing: (1) conscious and (2) unconscious.

The latter operates entirely below the surface of consciousness.

“Fast and Frugal”: you often know something and respond

accordingly before you fully understand and can explain it

The Adaptive Unconscious as an “Internal Computer”As a form of rapid cognition, it quickly and quietly processes a lot

of the data we need in order to keep functioning in our daily lives.

We toggle back and forth between conscious, deliberative decision-making and unconscious, more spontaneous decision-making.

e.g., Nalini Ambady’s “teacher rating” experiment:started with 3 ten-second silent video clips, then five-second clips and then finally two-second clips . . .

= end-of-the-semester full student evaluations

Thin Slicing with “Good” and “Bad” Decks of Cards