Paragraph 2 What does scientific literature tell us about the idea that body language reflects our real feelings? One experiment carried out about 10 years ago by Ross Buck from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pennsylvania suggests that spontaneous facial expression is not a very good index of real emotional state. Buck and his colleagues tested the accuracy with which people could identify the emotions felt by another person. They presented one set of subjects with color slides involving a variety of emotionally-loaded visual stimuli — such as “scenic” slides (landscapes, etc.), “maternal” slides (mothers and young children), disgusting slides (severe facial injuries and burns) and unusual slides (art objects). Unknown to these subjects, they were being televised and viewed by another matched set of subjects, who were asked to decide, on the basis of the televised facial expressions, which of the four sets of slides had just been viewed. This experiment involved both male and female pairs, but no pairs comprising both men and women; that is men observed only men, and women observed women. Buck found that the female pairs correctly identified almost 40 per cent of the slides used — this was above the level which would be predicted by chance alone (Chance level is 25 per cent here, as there were four classes of slide). But male pairs correctly identified only 28 per cent of slide s — not significantly above chance level. In other words, this study suggests that facial expression is not a very good index of “real” feeling — and in the case of men watching and interpreting other men, is almost useless. Topic:__ ______________________________________________________________________________ Main Idea : ___________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________