https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWry8xRTwpo
I find TED Talks very interesting to listen to, however I find this particular talk to be very interesting when considering my degree project.
Patryk & Kasia Wezowski begin by explaining how America’s election winner could be predicted by looking at voters micro expressions. Kasia also said that this was the first year (2013) that the presidential elections could be predicted because of emotions- not opinions. This really inspired me as I want to enable people to understand and identify with each others emotions however through my research I believe that this will be difficult if not impossible as people are influenced on their own experience and cultural opinions.
The talk then goes on to discuss what makes leaders successful. They speak about their own experiences of how they learnt to predict body language as a child. Patryk shares his experience of having a hearing disorder and how this encouraged him to read body language to help with communication. I believe that body language is universal throughout all cultures, of course there will be ever so slight differences however we are able to read when a person is happy, sad etc. This is what I am really struggling with at the moment. We understand that our body language is universal however we only know for example if a person is smiling they are happy. There has been no evidence to prove otherwise. However, we also identify with the ‘fake’ customer service smile. So if a person is acting, then how are we supposed to identify with how they feel. Furthermore, if a person is smiling they may be feeling sad however their reaction for sad is a smile and ours is happy- we both have difference understandings, therefore we never know otherwise.
Kasia first started studying body language at just three years old by examining the shoes of passengers on a bus. I think a lot of the time as human beings we make judgements on other people by their exterior. I want to examine the interior.
A very interesting part of the talk refers to Charles Darwin’s study of blind peoples facial expressions. It shows that even people that are blind from birth show micro expressions is the same way. It is interesting that in this example there is a person that has never seen another human being, nor had cultural or environmental influences. This shows that in many cases the brain causes these micro expressions to occur by foxing the muscles to contract in a particular way depending on the emotion.
