Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Did they Really Like their Christmas Present?

Giving and receiving Christmas gifts can be a stressful nightmare but how can you tell if someone really liked their gift?

In a survey of 2,000 Brits, 65% of people confessed to pretending to like a gift to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

The graphic above shows the body language signals to look for to see if someone does or doesn’t like their gift.

Most of us probably know how to read these signs somewhat instinctively- in a study conducted on gift giving, 680 men and women were asked to identify whether or not a recipient liked their gift. 75% of the participants were able to correctly do so. We covered this story in a past blog on Emotions in Gift Giving.

However, in this spirit of giving this holiday season, let’s remember that psychologist have also scientifically proven that one of the greatest contributing factors to overall happiness is how much gratitude you show.

It’s truly the thought that counts and expressing your appreciation for a gift (whether you truly like it or not) can lead to not only your happiness, but the gift giver as well.

 

It Pays to be able to Read Emotions, Literally.

7-2-2014 2-44-38 PMA recent study out of Germany suggests that one’s ability to read emotions in others may have a direct correlation to how much you earn.

In a study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, researchers looked at emotion recognition ability and tested and measured it along with other interpersonal skills such as how socially astute they were, their networking savvy and how seemingly trustworthy they were in 142 German workers.

High emotional recognition was linked to a higher salary, even after controlling for salary-bumping factors like age, gender, education, work experience and work hours.

“This very basic ability has effects on the interpersonal facilitation facet of job performance and, most notably, even on annual income, an objective indicator of career success,” the study authors wrote. “The better people are at recognizing emotions, the better they handle the politics in organizations and the interpersonal aspects of work life, and thus the more they earn in their jobs.”

So just how good are you at reading emotions in others? Humintell offers a full suite of products to help improve your emotion recognition ability!

Save 40% this holiday season on any online course until December 24th with code HOLIDAY40!

The History of Microexpressions

Click here to view the embedded video.

A microexpression is a brief involuntary expression of emotion.  They usually occur when an individual experiences a strong emotion but tries to conceal his/her feelings.  They may also occur because a person experiences multiple emotions in rapid succession.  Unlike normal facial expressions, it is difficult to voluntary produce or neutralize microexpressions.  They can express any of the seven emotions universally expressed in the face:  disgust, anger, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and contempt.  They can occur as fast as 1/15th to 1/30th of a second.

The History:

Microexpressions were first discovered by Haggard and Isaacs (1966).  In their study, Haggard and Isaacs outlined how they discovered these “micromomentary” expressions while scanning motion picture films of psychotherapy hours, searching for indications of non-verbal communication between patient and therapist.

At around the same time, Condon and Ogston (1967) pioneered the study of interactions at the fraction-of-a-second level.  In Condon’s famous research project, he scrutinized a four-and-a-half hour film segment frame by frame, where each frame represented 1/25th of a second.  After studying this film segment for a year and a half, he discerned interactional micromovements, such as the wife moving her shoulder exactly as the husband’s hands came up, which combined yielded microrhythms.  Condon’s work, however, did not focus on facial expressions.

Subsequently, Ekman and Friesen (1969, 1974) included the concept of microexpressions in their studies of deception.  The results of this work were reported in the book Telling Lies (Ekman, 1985), and were popularized in the mass media through the television series Lie To Me.  They also play a central role in Robert Ludlum’s posthumously published The Ambler Warning, in which the central character, Harrison Ambler, is an intelligence agent who is able to see them [microexpressions].  Similarly, one of the main characters in Alastair Reynolds’ science fiction novel Absolution Gap, Aura, can easily read microexpressons.  On Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Detective Robert Goren was adept in detecting microexpressions.

Although the existence of microexpressons was reported in the 1960′s, the first report published in a peer-reviewed, scientific article validating their existence was Porter and ten Brinke (2008).  And, the first report published in a peer-reviewed, scientific article about tests of the ability to recognize microexpressions was Matsumoto et  al.’s (2000).

Some studies have indicated that the ability to read microexpressions is indeed related to the ability to detect deception; ironically, the most recent studies suggest that the ability to read subtle expressions (expressions of low intensity), not microexpressions, are better related to the ability to detect deceit.

References Cited:

Condon, W., S,, & Ogston, W. D. (1967). A segmentation of behavior. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 5, 221-235.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding.     Semiotica, 1, 49-98.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1974). Nonverbal behavior and psychopathology. In R. J. Friedman & M. Katz (Eds.), The psychology of depression: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 3-31). Washington, D. C.: Winston and Sons.

Haggard, E. A., & Isaacs, K. S. (1966). Micro-momentary facial expressions as indicators of ego mechanisms in psychotherapy. In L. A. Gottschalk & A. H. Auerbach (Eds.), Methods of Research in Psychotherapy (pp. 154-165). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Matsumoto, D., LeRoux, J. A., Wilson-Cohn, C., Raroque, J., Kooken, K., Ekman, P., . . . Goh, A. (2000). A new test to measure emotion recognition ability: Matsumoto and Ekman’s Japanese and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition Test (JACBART). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 24(3), 179-209.

Porter, S., & ten Brinke, L. (2008). Reading between the lies: Identifying concealed and falsified emotions in universal facial expressions. Psychological Science, 19(5), 508-514.