Scientist: Poker Face No Ace In The Hole

 A stone-cold expression has long been a staple in the pokerplayer's arsenal. In a new study, Erik Schlicht, a visiting lecturer of psychology at Wellesley College, reexamined the neutral "poker face" and found it may not be the best strategy.

"Surprisingly, we find that threatening face information has little influence on wagering behavior, but faces relaying positive emotional characteristics impact peoples' decisions. People took significantly longer and made more mistakes against emotionally positive opponents." wrote the studies' authors. "According to these results, the best 'poker face' for bluffing may not be a neutral face, but rather a face that contains emotional correlates of trustworthiness."

His research, "Human Wagering Behavior Depends on Opponents' Faces" was published July 21 by PLoS ONE and has since been featured in Scientific American, The New York Times and on Boston's Channel 5, among others.

Schlicht, a cognitive scientist at Aptima, researches how people perform movements and make decisions under conditions of risk. He is also interested in how people use opponent information to modify their decisions in competitive wagering tasks.