Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Susan Constantine Appears on Dr Phil Show about Ashley Summers

Taken from Humintell Affiliate, Susan Constantine’s website:

Orlando, FL – March 20, 2015 – ATM surveillance photos taken in Warwick, Rhode Island in October 2014 and subsequently released by the city’s police department are currently garnering much attention. There is interest in determining whether they show Ashley Summers, the girl who went missing from her Cleveland home at the age of 14 back on July 9, 2007.

There were no witnesses to offer an account of what happened to Summers, and for eight years, no leads have yielded answers and her disappearance has remained unsolved. Now, the FBI has taken an interest in the ATM photos, publicized in relation to a string of ID thefts, after being alerted to them by Summers’ step-grandmother. She believes the woman in the pictures bears a striking resemblance to her missing step-granddaughter. Many agree, and the woman is also said to closely resemble computer-generated images of what Summers would look like now, at age 21.

As the FBI works to analyze the new evidence that may establish Summers is still alive, the Dr. Phil show invited Susan Constantine, MPsy, a leading body language and facial recognition expert, to provide her own analysis while appearing alongside the Summers family. She herself has trained law enforcement personnel in reading body language and detecting deception, and is a frequent guest on national television programs offering body language analysis of public figures, court testimonies and more.

On Monday, March 23, Constantine appeared on the Dr Phil Show and applied her expertise to comparing these most recent images to those of the girl prior to her disappearance. She draws on extensive experience in facial mapping and expressions to draw a conclusion as to whether or not the young woman seen in these surveillance photos are in fact Ashley Summers, eight years after her mysterious disappearance.

Constantine’s analysis does more than shed light on how these images affect the famously dead-ended case of the missing girl from Cleveland, though. Her appearance also offers fascinating insights into how law enforcement professionals evaluate, compare, contrast, and “read” images to determine whether they offer solid evidence to support theories and hunches.

Watch Constantine decipher the clues provided by facial recognition techniques and examining body language, and hear her verdict on Dr. Phil.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fake Laughter

asian gal_white guy happyLike many aspects of human behavior, laughter is complicated.

In a recent article for Time, Dr. Greg Bryant, an associate professor at UCLA outlines a study he conducted at his Vocal Communication Lab. There, he and his research team played recorded laughs to participants and asked them to distinguish whether the laugh was “real” or “fake”. The real laughter was from live conversations between friends in a laboratory setting and the fake laughter was produced on command.

Interestingly, listeners were able to tell the “real” laughs from the “fake” laughs about 70 percent of the time. Which means 30 percent of the time, they couldn’t tell the difference. Bryant was interested in why people fell for the fake laughs.

Bryant says, “Laughter triggers the release of brain endorphins that make us feel good, and it reduces stress. There is even evidence that we experience a temporary slight muscle weakness called cataplexy when we laugh, so we could be communicating that we are unlikely (or relatively unable) to attack. But laughter is not always made in fun, and can be quite hurtful (e.g., teasing). Laughter is a powerful signal with huge communicative flexibility.

A fake laugh is produced with a slightly different set of vocal muscles controlled by a different part of our brain. The result is that there are subtle features of the laughs that sound like speech, and recent evidence suggests people are unconsciously quite sensitive to them…The ability to be a good faker has its advantages, so there has likely been evolutionary pressure to fake it well, with subsequent pressure on listeners to be good “faker detectors.” This “arms race” dynamic, as it’s called in evolutionary biology, results in good fakers, and good fake detectors, as evidenced by many recent studies, including my own.”

Dr. Bryant suggests that the reasons we laugh are as complicated as our social lives, and relate closely to our personal relationships and communicative strategies. He states that one focus of researchers now is trying to decipher the relationship between specific sound features of our laughs—from loud belly laughs to quiet snickering—and what listeners perceive those features to mean.

 

When Getting Angry is Good

Bus drivers and bouncers face it with some frequency;  so do counselors and psychologists; but call center employees are on the frontline. Do you ever get angry at them?

Anger has been viewed as a negative emotion, unproductive and destructive – but what if this emotion is actually really good for you?

This program will get honest about anger – its limitations and its potential.

Join guest host Anton Enus as we look at how anger works in the brain and in society. Insight asks: can we use it for positive gain?