Expression of the Day
What expression is this and why? How do you know?
Mirror Neurons At Work
I’ve gotten a good lesson on the power of mirror neurons lately. It’s been fascinating.
In my class that I teach to law enforcement, I play multiple videos that show intense emotions. Usually while the videos play, I take a seat facing the audience off to the side of the class. I typically can’t see the video because I want to be out the way and not infringing on the screen so my audience gets the be possible view.
When I videos play, I often find something to distract myself, but inevitably, there are a few minutes where I am waiting for the video to end and it is at ths time that I am facing the students.
Multiple times now I have felt a flush of emotion come over me when look at students, and I’ve realized when this happened that I am looking at a person who is intensely feeling the emotions of the person in the video they are watching.
I just never knew how powerful mirror neurons could be that they could affect a person watching a video and also affect me, who is not watching the video, but watching the person who is watching the video.
I have seen these videos hundreds of times so they don’t affect me anymore. I have become desensitized to them over time, but clearly I am not desensitized to others who are reacting to them.
Isn’t that bizarre?
I have felt my eyebrows go oblique only to realize I am starring at a young mom who feels great pain seeing a parent plea for their missing child.
It’s been absolutely astounding to experience.
I always enjoy pointing it out to my students that when you just watched that video of a desparate mom, you four displayed strong signals of sadness. They typically have no idea their eyebrows knitted together in an “A shape” but they do acknowledge they did feel pain or heartbreak for the people in the video.
It’s incredibly fascinating.
I wonder if psychopaths have a short-circuit when it comes to mirror neurons? I suspect they do!
Ryan Ferguson Loses Appeal
I have been following the Ryan Ferguson case since 2006 when I first saw it air on 48 Hours. I immediately believed Ryan Ferguson was innocent from the very first interview I saw of him, and I was sad that he was serving time for a crime that he didn’t commit.
I held out great hope that Ryan would be freed as people came out and started backtracking on their stories–the stories that were used to convicted Ryan. And I held out the greatest hope that his latest appeal by Kathleen Zellner, who I highly respect, would be granted, but sadly last week while I was out of town training professionals, I got the word his appeal was denied.
To say that I am very upset is an understatement. This is a huge injustice being done to an innocent man. The judge in the case, Green stated in his ruling that Ryan did not prove his “actual innocence” in the killing of Kent Heitholt, a sports editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Eriely, Green’s ruling came exactly 11 years to the day that Heitholt was killed.
As someone who is an expert in deception, I have always struggled with proving, and showing innocence. How do you do it? I think for someone to have to prove this standard, we need to define exactly how this is done because the only way I know to prove innocence is to show any lack of involvement, which Ryan has proven without a doubt.
I’d personally like to ask the judge, how does one meet this standard of actual innocence? How does one prove it? What are the guidelines for this?
It’s easy to prove guilt. It is much, much more difficult to prove innocence.
Just Got Back…
Just got back from delivering training in Las Vegas. Had a great trip, but unfortunately caught a bug of sorts. I’m under the weather with a sore throat today, but hopefully the blog will come back to life shortly here!
I took this photo yesterday afternoon as we took off past the strip. I thought it was a cool view!!
The weather in Vegas yesterday was awesome–80 degrees! It was great to have a few minutes to spare to sit out by the pool before getting back.
Adam and Lina Kaufman: 48 Hours
Did you happen to watch 48 Hours this week and see the story of Adam and Lina Kaufman? Adam says he woke up in the middle of the night and then early in the morning, and his wife was not in bed and so he went to look for her. At first he thought she was with the kids, but then he found her hunched over a magazine rack in the bathroom–unresponsive.
Adam is a difficult person to read for a lot of people. He has a very baseline facial expression that do not show a lot of emotion and I suspect it makes it hard for people to understand what Adam is feeling.
I personally believe Adam is telling the truth, and that he is honest. I do believe that Lina died of a pre-existing heart condition.
I am so happy that justice was served in this case!
