Think you are good at reading people?

Think you're good at reading people? Most people feel they are, but actually fail miserably at it, confusing a half smile with approval when it signals contempt, or accepting an expression of apparent confidence while missing the concealed fear that lies beneath it.

Misreading facial expressions and the emotions underlying them results in a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Often the failure comes from an inability to recognize minute expressions -- micro-expressions that flash across a face for less than a 15th of a second -- that reveal the true emotions a person may be uncomfortable expressing or is simply trying to conceal.

"These expressions tend to be very extreme and very fast," said Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and an expert in the physiology of emotion and nonverbal communication. "Eighty to 90 percent of people we tested don't see them."

Micro-expressions represent "the most extreme expressions human beings can make in a very fast period of time" and usually involve the entire face. Subtle expressions are easily overlooked because they involve minor movement in parts of the face -- raised eyelids that might signal the beginnings of fear or surprise, or the angled upturn of the inner eyebrows that might signal the beginnings of sadness.

But a new set of CD-ROMs developed by Ekman can help people recognize emotional "leakage" -- facial expressions that signal when a person is willfully suppressing or unconsciously repressing an emotion.

Training anyone, in under an hour, to spot fleeting expressions and interpret emotions they might otherwise miss if they were distracted by a person's gestures or tone of voice.

The Micro emotions are concealed emotions, and the Subtle Expression which explores more subtle expressions that occur when someone is just beginning to feel an emotion.

There are seven emotions universally expressed by all cultures -- anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness, happiness and contempt (interpreted as moral superiority).

Ekman said people most often confuse the expressions for fear and surprise, as well as the ones for anger and disgust, because they involve some of the same muscles.

Ekman's daughter, Eve, is the model in the SETT CD, which runs through the seven emotions as they might flit across various parts of the face -- for instance, the wrinkled nose that universally signifies disgust (or perhaps simply the smell of bad fish).