Mark Frank

Mark G. Frank, born in 1961 in Buffalo, New York, is a communication professor, department chair, and expert on human nonverbal communication, emotion, and deception. At the University at Buffalo, he directs the Communication Science Center research laboratory on the North Campus, where graduate researchers conduct experiments and studies for private and government entities. His work joins communication and psychology with the practical demands of law enforcement, especially in the reading of verbal and nonverbal behavior.

Frank’s interest in deception was shaped early by the world around him. His father served as a Buffalo Police officer for 32 years, a background that influenced Frank’s interest in criminal deception detection. While in college, Frank worked as a bouncer in local bars and began paying close attention to underage patrons trying to enter with fake identification. That experience helped him notice patterns in how people behaved when they were lying. He later studied hours of video footage of criminals, watching how they interacted and learning to pick up subtle facial movements that could leak out during deception.

Frank graduated from the University at Buffalo in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He earned his PhD in Social Psychology from Cornell University in 1989, with Thomas Gilovich as his dissertation advisor. After Cornell, he received a National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health for postdoctoral research with Paul Ekman in the Psychiatry Department at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School. Their project, “A Few Can Catch A Liar,” provided the first evidence that some psychologists can achieve high accuracy in catching lies.

His academic career took him to the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia in 1992, and four years later to Rutgers University. He is currently a professor at SUNY University at Buffalo in the Department of Communications and Director of the Department of Communication Science Center. Over time, Frank became known for research on micro expressions of emotion and the face, as well as other nonverbal indicators of deception across the body. He has named 44 movements linked to emotions related to deception, including fear, distrust, and stress. He has described these fleeting expressions as minute, unconscious movements of facial muscles that are almost impossible to control when driven by underlying emotion.

Frank has also trained more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States and overseas. His training focuses on the role emotion plays in predicting violence, and he has taught federal agents, interrogators, judges, magistrates, and other law enforcement officials to interpret facial “hot spots,” his term for facial or emotional cues that may suggest concealed emotion. He has said he can distinguish truth from lies about 70 percent of the time, so he treats micro expressions not as proof, but as indicators that an emotion may be hidden. He has briefed the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Congress on deception and counter-terrorism, worked with agencies such as the Metropolitan Police Service in London, and collaborated with the Transportation Security Administration on behavioral screening and biometrics.

Frank’s work remains compelling because it deals with a basic human problem: what people show, what they hide, and how carefully anyone should claim to know the difference. The quote attributed to him on this site, “Loneliness is the price you pay when you start to improve yourself,” fits the same sober view of human behavior. His research does not treat insight as magic. It treats it as observation, practice, caution, and a willingness to look closely at what people may not mean to reveal.