Members in the Media
From: The Atlantic

If You’re Happy and You Know It, Raise Your Head

The Atlantic:

Shortly after Steven Livingstone arrived at McGill University, he went out to a bar with some new friends to check out the Montreal nightlife. It was loud, and crowded, and dimly lit, and he found himself struggling to hear when one of his friends tried to talk to him.

“Because it was dark at the bar, I couldn’t see his face either,” Livingstone says. “But I could see his head. He was moving his head in a really sort of animated fashion, and it was at that moment that I realized that he was excited about something. He was trying to tell me about it. So that sort of lit a little candle in my head.”

He was working in the McGill psychology professor Caroline Palmer’s Sequence Production Lab at the time, and told her about his observation. And that night in the bar led to a new study on the role of head movements in conveying emotions, recently published in the journal Emotion.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic

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