Jan van Hooff visits chimpanzee “Mama”, 59 yrs old and very sick. Emotional meeting

Can we recognize emotions amongst other species? Can they recognize ours? If our emotional recognition skills expand to other species besides humans, that tells us a great deal about the universality and evolutionary basis of our expressions, including our basic emotions. In this amazing video, Dr. Jan van Hooff visits an elderly chimpanzee, Mama, whom…

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Why Some People Lie Better Than Others

Lie detection is tough for a lot of people, but why do some people happen to just be better at it than others? This is an important question not just in our attempts to understand how to detect deception but also in efforts to better understand the role of emotional recognition in lie detection. A…

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Nonverbal Behavior: Who Are The Landmarks in the Field?

We spend a great deal of time talking about Humintell’s work on nonverbal behavior, but it’s important to know that this is a wide and exciting field! In a recent paper in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, a pair of researchers sought to map out the major authors and major papers that have dominated the…

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Farming and the Evolution of Speech

As we know, many of our nonverbal behaviors have deep roots in our own process of evolution, but maybe our verbal behaviors have historical roots too. While perhaps not quite as deeply ingrained as biological evolution, a new study in Science found evidence that many of our speech patterns can be linked back to changing…

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