Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Whether the mission is Unconventional Warfare, Foreign Internal Defense, or Counterinsurgency, success is often dependent on an individual’s and/or unit’s ability to both understand the vulnerabilities of their foreign counterparts on psychological, cultural, and operational levels, and to influence those counterparts in a manner consistent with US military and political objectives. While many of the criteria for assessment and selection, training, and employment of Special Operations Forces (SOF) supporting Special Warfare are skill-based, the conduct of Special Warfare is often relationship-based. In fact, ARSOF Next lists not only empathy as a characteristic of an Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) unit but also love as a desired trait of an ARSOF soldier. These psychological constructs are applicable both internally (toward one’s in-group) and externally (toward one’s out-group) and are measurable, albeit not easily, and therefore capable of being evaluated in assessment and selection and cultivated during training. However, the spectrum of today’s assessment and selection arguably misses the most valuable psychological characteristic, emotional intelligence. For the past 2 years, the Paul Ekman Group (PEG) has provided a specialized version of the Evaluating Truthfulness and Credibility (ETaC) seminar to Special Forces soldiers. These facial micro-expressions, or “micros,” are proven to be both cross-cultural and involuntary, and are thus an ideal fundamental skill for ARSOF soldiers. ETaC focuses on understanding the five channels of communication (face, body language, voice, verbal style, and verbal content) and their behavioral manifestations to better assess the credibility of another. The seminars were not only well received by the participants but also, despite a relatively high baseline competency, demonstrated statistically significant performance improvement in a matter of hours. Not only do such results begin to validate the emotional intelligence of this specifically chosen audience, but it helps to demonstrate the capacity of these unique soldiers to develop their cognitive processes to effectively influence their environment. While the sample size is small, the results are promising and are worthy of additional research. This paper presents the background and summary of these seminars, as well as some recommendations for incorporating more emotional components of Special Warfare.

The ability to detect if someone is lying is one of the most important skills a person can have, across roles and professions. Demonstrating a generalized understanding of emotions and lies is a noteworthy foundation in life. Observers who are skilled in discerning emotions, which are universal, and lies, which can be argued are universal as well, make their judgments on two important dimensions that support Dr. Ekman’s general hypothesis. As the research demonstrates, people have different abilities to lie (consistent with Ekman., et al. 1991 and Kraut 1980); a remarkable cross-situational finding, especially since it is generalized. With regards to gender, the research has indicated that men differ from women in their deception clues (DePaulo., et al. 1985). Researchers have studied and documented unplanned facial expressions, including face measurement. Dr. Paul Ekman’s extensive and intriguing work has been about the analysis of emotions and facial expressions, and the overall relationship between these two. He became famous, and accepted as a world-renowned expert, for his talent to discriminate truth from deception. My professional intrigue with his study of emotions and facial expressions, is tied in to my work as a psychotherapist. The ability to assist clients who are struggling and/or in denial, is strengthened by directing the client to be as truthful as possible, for their own benefit.

Two distinctions are introduced that were not previously explicit in the literature on compassion, which might clarify what is being studied and encourage attention to forms of compassion that have been largely ignored. The first distinction is whether the target of the compassionate behavior is proximal (e.g., seeing someone fall down, badly scraping his or her knee) or distal (e.g., someone not directly observed who might be injured now or in the future). Proximal is immediate, remedial if possible for the suffering witnessed; distal prevents harm in the future from occurring. The second set of distinctions refers to whether the compassion is empathic, involves action, or is an aspiration.

Reports published in Washington emphasize the concern of those who direct the Vietnam-related policy for gaining public support for US intervention in Vietnam. Surely no president has read the results of certain surveys with more attention than Johnson, on this particular issue. It's therefore relevant and important to investigate the type of information that such questionnaires provide. So far, reports indicate that public opinion has not been explored in sufficient detail to give political leaders a complete picture of American thought on what can be done in Vietnam and its possible cost.

In recent years, the field of emotion has grown enormously-recently, nearly 250 scientists were identified who are studying emotion. In this article, I report a survey of the field, which revealed high agreement about the evidence regarding the nature of emotion, supporting some of both Darwin's and Wundt's 19th century proposals. Topics where disagreements remain were also exposed.

The question of whether emotional expressions have universal meanings has been at the center of heated debates for many decades (e.g., Ekman, 1994; Russell, 1994). In a recent contribution, Gendron, Roberson, van der Vyver, and Barrett (2014) took issue with our study of emotional vocalizations, in which we claimed to show that some nonverbal sounds reliably communicate emotional states across cultures (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010). In their Study 2, Gendron et al. replicated part of our study (Himba listeners hearing British vocalizations), but analyzed their data in terms of the valance and arousal of the distractors. They found that recognition was not better than chance for most types of distractors and concluded that emotional vocalizations signal valence, but not specific emotions. We welcome their attempted partial replication of our work. Their article has impelled us to reanalyze our original data in more depth. However, given the results of our reanalysis, together with alternative explanations for the results Gendron et al. obtained, we find that their conclusion does not hold. In our study (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2010), participants listened to a series of brief emotion stories. On each trial, they heard two vocalizations: one target (consistent with the story) and one distractor. Our original results, analyzed by emotion but not distractor type, showed cross-cultural recognition of six emotions: Participants selected target vocalizations more often than would be expected by chance. However, three of the four positive emotions included in our study were not reliably recognized by Himba participants listening to British sounds. A fair test of whether recognition performance exceeds chance levels with different types of distractors should include only those emotion categories that participants can recognize at better-than-chance levels, because we made no claims that the other types of vocalizations communicate specific emotional states across cultures. The fact that Gendron et al. (2014) included these emotions in their analysis resulted in a considerable reduction in overall accuracy (as shown by the particularly low accuracy they found for positive emotions). Our reanalysis therefore excluded target vocalizations of the culture-specific signals of triumph, pleasure, and relief. In our original study, we varied distractors systematically, according to whether their perceived valence was the same as or different from that of the target (valence ratings taken from Sauter, Eisner, Calder, & Scott, 2010). For each emotion, every participant performed two trials with distractors having the same valence as the target and two trials with distractors having the valence opposite that of the target.1 We reanalyzed the data from the 29 Himba participants in our original study who had heard British vocalizations, the part of our study that Gendron et al. (2014) replicated. Each trial was coded for the relationship of the distractor to the target: same valence or different valence. Because surprise is valence neutral, trials in which surprise was either the target or the distractor were removed. Following Gendron et al. (2014), we calculated the percentage of correct classifications across emotions for each of these trial types (same or different valence), but only for the basic emotions. One-sample t tests comparing performance with chance (50%) revealed that participants’ performance was significantly above chance, both when distractors were of the valence opposite that of the target, t(28) = 7.30, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.36 (mean difference = 27.22, 95% confidence interval, CI, of the difference = [19.58, 34.86]), and when distractors were of the same valence as the target, t(28) = 4.05, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 0.75 (mean difference = 13.45, 95% CI of the difference = [6.64, 20.26]; see Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Himba participants’ recognition performance (percentage correct) for basic emotions and all valenced emotions, for trials on which the distractor and target were of the same valence and trials on which the distractor and target were of different ... What might underlie the difference in results between our study and the study by Gendron et al. (2014)? As noted, Gendron et al. included culture-specific signals of positive emotions, and this drove down recognition rates. In addition, overall accuracy levels were considerably lower in their study than in ours (mean overall accuracy across all nine emotions in our study was 64.46%; approximate mean overall accuracy based on Fig. 4 in Gendron et al. was 51%). We repeated our analysis including all eight valenced emotions and found that participants’ recognition was again significantly better than chance, both when the distractor and target were of opposite valence, t(28) = 8.30, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.54 (mean difference = 21.37, 95% CI of the difference = [16.09, 26.64]), and when they had the same valence, t(28) = 2.79, p < .01, Cohen’s d = 0.52 (mean difference = 6.71, 95% CI of the difference = [1.79, 11.63]; see Fig. 1). An apparent difference in procedure could account for the poor recognition rates Gendron et al. (2014) obtained. In our study, each participant was asked, after each story, how the target person was feeling, in order to ensure that the participant had understood the story correctly. This is because in pilot testing, we found that participants would frequently say that they had understood a story, but were unable to explain it when they were asked to. In our study, therefore, we allowed participants to listen several times to a given recorded story (if needed), until they could explain the intended emotion in their own words, before they proceeded to the experimental trials for that story. The inclusion of a rigorous manipulation check with experimenter verification, rather than reliance on participants’ reports, was thus crucial. Gendron et al. did not report having included this check, indicating only that participants who wished to were allowed to hear the scenarios again. This raises the possibility that some participants in their study may not have correctly understood the intended emotional states. This may also help to explain the perplexing pattern in the data obtained by Gendron et al. (2014): Recognition was better than chance only when the distractor matched the target in arousal and not in valence, and not when the distractor differed from the target in both arousal and valence. The authors acknowledged that this finding was unexpected; it does not fit with their account that vocalizations communicate valence-based information. In conclusion, we have presented new analyses that show that nonverbal vocalizations communicate specific emotional states, regardless of the valence of the distractor with which they are presented. Furthermore, we have proposed alternative explanations for the failure of Gendron et al. to find this pattern in their data. We hope that this contribution will serve as a useful addition to the debate on what information can be inferred from emotional expressions cross-culturally.

Anticipation may play a role in shaping biological reactions to repeated stressors-a common feature of modern life. We aimed to demonstrate that: (a) individuals who display a larger cortisol response to an initial stressor exhibit progressive anticipatory sensitization, showing progressively higher cortisol levels before subsequent exposures, and (b) attention/emotional skills training can reduce the magnitude of this effect on progressive anticipatory sensitization. Female school teachers (N=76) were randomly assigned to attention/emotion skills and meditation training or to a control group. Participants completed 3 separate Trier Social Stress Tests (TSST): at baseline (Session 1), post-training (Session 2), and five months post (Session 3). Each TSST session included preparing and delivering a speech and performing an arithmetic task in front of critical evaluators. In each session participants' salivary cortisol levels were determined before and after the stressor. Control participants with larger cortisol reactivity to the first stressor showed increasing anticipatory (pre-stressor) cortisol levels with each successive stressor exposure (TSST session)-suggesting progressive anticipatory sensitization. Yet this association was absent in the training group. Supplementary analyses indicated that these findings occurred in the absence of group differences in cortisol reactivity. Findings suggest that the stress response can undergo progressive anticipatory sensitization, which may be modulated by attention/emotion-related processes. An important implication of the construct of progressive anticipatory sensitization is a possible self-perpetuating effect of stress reactions, providing a candidate mechanism for the translation of short-to-long-term stress reactions.

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The Improving Interpersonal Evaluations for Law Enforcement and National Security techniqueThe Improving Interpersonal Evaluations for Law Enforcement and National Security technique (IIE) is derived from observations of reallife field interviews combined with the latest scientific behavioural analysis. It originated in the dissatisfaction of working police towards their interviewing training. This dissatisfaction caused J.J. Newberry (US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, now retired) to observe the techniques of the most successful working police officers (those who when they chose to charge a suspect typically obtained a conviction, and who other officers viewed as being the most effective interviewers). These observations were elaborated and refined, based upon close contact with behavioural scientists with expertise in human memory, emotion and expressive verbal and non-verbal behaviour, including deception (e.g. Yuille 1989; Ekman and Frank 1993, Newberry 1999; Ekman 1985/2001; Frank and Ekman 1997, 2004a, 2004b; O'Sullivan 2005). In summary, this approach noted that good police interviewers were excellent communicators. They listened well, built good rapport with their interviewees and they were sharp observers of verbal and non-verbal behaviours, which included being good detectors of deceit. The techniques of these good interviewers were quantified by the behavioural scientists and then developed into training packages that addressed building the individual skills along with full application of the techniques to live interviews.

The effects of two kinds of meditation (open presence and focused) on the facial and physiological aspects of the defensive response to an aversive startle stimulus were studied in a Buddhist monk with approximately 40 years of meditation experience. The participant was exposed to a 115-db, 100-ms acoustic startle stimulus under the 2 meditation conditions, a distraction condition (to control for cognitive and attentional load) and an unanticipated condition (startle presented without warning or instruction). A completely counterbalanced 24-trial, single-subject design was used, with each condition repeated 6 times. Most aspects of the participant's responses in the unanticipated condition did not differ from those of a comparison group of 12 age-matched male controls. Both kinds of meditation produced physiological and facial responses to the startle that were smaller than in the distraction condition. Within meditation conditions, open presence meditation produced smaller physiological and facial responses than focused meditation. These results from a single highly expert meditator indicate that these 2 kinds of meditation can differentially alter the magnitude of a primitive defensive response.

![Figure][1] CREDIT: PETER AND MARIA HOEY/WWW.PETERHOEY.COMEarly in my career, I didn't know whether facial expressions of emotion were universal (Darwin's claim) or culture-specific (Margaret Mead's claim). In 1967, I traveled to a remote part of New Guinea to find out in an environment virtually untouched by Western culture. Among the secluded Fore people's traditions was cannibalism; the community ate people they respected after they died of natural causes. The Fore were still using stone tools and had never encountered a photograph or camera, and I was unfamiliar with their language and customs. One boy who knew Pidgin (which I had also learned before my trip) served as my translator. With his help, I asked the villagers to look at photographs of people displaying various emotions and invent stories about them. The study progressed slowly; my foreign ways were met with suspicion.One day, about 2 weeks after my arrival, I was sitting outside eating my lunch of pit-pit (a vegetable similar to asparagus). An elder of the village approached me, and as I stood to greet him, I saw that he was followed by about 100 tribesman—more than half the village. The man stopped directly in front on me, reached down, and began pinching my thigh. To my horror, the villagers behind him began jumping and screaming with emotion. I searched the crowd for weapons and tried to hide my panic.Suddenly, realization dawned. The people's expressions did not show anger. They were smiling and laughing. As I learned later, the village elder had declared that he planned to eat me when I died. From then on, I was a respected member of the tribe. My research proceeded with full cooperation from the villagers, and showed what I learned that day the hard way: Facial expressions do indeed transcend cultures. I left New Guinea before the elder tribesman could make good on his promise, but I hope at least he found my research palatable. [1]: pending:yes