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Guides: faces, attention and the science

Short articles on the topics Noticely teaches. Each starts with a short answer, explains what the research says, including its limits, and lists the studies behind it.

• Guides · 01What are micro-expressions, and can they reveal lies?A micro-expression is a facial expression that appears and disappears very quickly, usually defined as lasting less than half a second. Micro-expressions are real but rare: in one study only about 2% of coded expressions were micro-expressions. People detect lies only slightly better than chance, and micro-expression training has not been shown to improve lie detection.Read the guide
• Guides · 02The seven basic facial expressions and their cues (FACS)The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) describes faces as small muscle movements called action units. Seven commonly studied emotions are linked to typical combinations: raised lip corners and cheeks for happiness, high brows and a dropped jaw for surprise, wide eyes for fear, raised inner brows for sadness, lowered brows and tense lids for anger, a wrinkled nose for disgust, one tightened lip corner for contempt.Read the guide
• Guides · 03Fear vs surprise, anger vs disgust: telling similar expressions apartFear and surprise both raise the brows and widen the eyes. In fear the brows are straighter and pulled together, the upper lids rise further and the lips stretch sideways; in surprise the brows curve and the jaw drops loosely. Anger and disgust both lower the brows: disgust wrinkles the nose and raises the upper lip, anger tenses the lids and presses the lips.Read the guide
• Guides · 04How attention is measured: reaction time, flanker and visual searchPsychologists measure attention with short tasks: reaction time to a randomly timed signal for alertness, the flanker task for ignoring distraction, visual search for finding a target, go/no-go tasks for holding back. A phone adds roughly 50–100 ms of delay to every tap, and the amount differs between devices, so compare phone results with your own earlier results, not with lab norms.Read the guide
• Guides · 05Sleep and attention: what short nights do to your focusSleep loss affects sustained attention more than any other mental ability studied: in a meta-analysis of 70 studies, simple attention showed the largest effect. Short nights also add up. People who slept six hours a night for two weeks showed growing attention lapses, while feeling only a little sleepier. Adults are advised to sleep at least seven hours a night.Read the guide
• Guides · 06How to get better at recognising facial expressions: 7 tipsPractise with feedback: look at a face, decide what moved, then check the answer and see the cue you missed. Start with the eyes and brows, learn the pairs that get confused, practise briefly and often, and use faces of different people. Training studies show that such practice improves recognition, while reading emotions from faces still needs context and humility.Read the guide