Micro Expressions

There are many benefits from learning micro expressions. First, micro expressions can help us to improve our emotional intelligence. One of the keys to improving emotional intelligence is developing skills which help us understand the human face. Unlike language or gesture, the face is a universal system of signals which reflect the moment to moment fluctuations in a person’s emotional state. Micro expressions make us better to understand the people that we interact with. It can also help us to improving our relationship because improving our ability to recognize others’ emotions will increase the intimate understanding that allows us to connect with other people.

By learning the micro expressions, we who have jobs that requiring face to face interactions can improve our skills in reading the emotions and feelings of others and, at the same time, we will likely become more aware of our own feelings.  Then, reading micro expressions can aid the development of rapport, trust, and collegiality. It’s also very useful to making credibility assessments, evaluating truthfulness, and detecting deception. Better information about emotional states which is provided by micro expressions can be used as the basis for better cooperation, negotiation, or sales.

As example, health professionals can develop better rapport with patients, interact humanely with empathy and compassion, and make the right diagnosis by obtaining complete information. Teachers can read the emotions of their students to obtain cues about the progress of their lesson plans, so they can adjust accordingly and deliver them more effectively. School administrators who read the emotions of their teachers can reduce burnout and also maintain and improve teacher effectiveness. Business persons and negotiators who can read the emotions of others can build a mutually beneficial collaborations. Product researchers can improve the qualitative data they obtain from consumers by reading consumer’s emotions when evaluating products, giving hints as to what they truly feel despite what they say about it. Salesman can be much better at sales with learning micro expressions. Parents, spouses, friends, and everyone with an interest in building strong and constructive relationships can take benefit from improving their ability to read emotions. Research has also found that people who learned to spot micro expressions were better liked by co-workers.

Micro expressions can help us to develop our capacity for empathy. Emotions play a key role in all of our interactions. Common expressions on the face (macro expressions) may not accurately portray how someone is feeling. When we can recognize the fleeting and more evasive expressions that arise, we become more sensitive to the range of emotions and we can know what they are actually feeling. We also become more skilled at noticing when an emotion is just beginning, when an emotion is being concealed, and when a person is unaware of what they are actually feeling. These are skills that can help us become more sensitive to the real feelings of others, and to let others know, when appropriate, that they are truly “seen.” Recent research has shown that physicians’ ability to recognize emotion from briefly presented facial expressions predicted patients’ ratings of the physicians’ empathy.

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