Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Mapping Feelings

Feelings are often associated with physical reactions: terror can send chills down your spine, and love can leave you weak in the knees.  A recent study has linked specific emotions to physical sensations. Researchers at the Academy of Finland and Aalto University tested emotional responses in hundreds of subjects and then created maps identifying locations in the body where emotions cause physical changes.

They found that common emotions trigger strong sensations in specific parts of our bodies. The study was conducted with over 700 participants from Finland, Sweden and Taiwan. The findings indicate that emotions and their bodily responses have a biological basis.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Where Do You Feel Your Strongest Emotion ?

Hot Spot The Liar

stockvault-playing-cards134256

Courtesy of StockVault

The New York Times recently published an short article about people’s ability on recognize and interpret Hot Spots.  Hot Spots are inconsistencies between what people say and what their non-verbals are displaying.

An example of a hot spot would be, if you ask a person how they like your dress and they say “I love it!” but they flash a micorexpression of disgust, this would be a hot spot. What they said and what their body said are inconsistent with each other.

Many layman, outside of government agencies,  especially poker players refer to hot spots as “tells”.  In a University of Chicago study on body language and lying, subjects  were asked several general questions while being videotaped.  They were concurrently told off camera to lie or tell the truth when answering.

The videos, although entertaining do not necessarily depict true Hot Spots.  According to microexpression expert Dr. David Matsumoto, if you just have an individual tell a truth or lie without any high-stakes (gaining or losing something significant)  involved, they will not elicit the same behavior as they naturally would if put in a high-stakes situation where they really wanted to conceal their true feelings.

Its important to understand that hot spots are not a definitive sign that someone is lying, but often times are circumstances where there is an underlying or hidden message (i.e. more to the story than is being told).   If you see a hot spot, you should ask more questions, or find out why that individual has hidden feelings about that particular topic.

To watch the videos and see for yourself, take a look at the entire article.

 What are your thoughts on Determining Veracity from Deception? 

Bright Lights & Emotion

morning landscape

Courtesy of StockVault

Health Central.com has enlightened us on new research that suggests bright lights, including the sun, are not as comforting and positively associated as many people might think.

So, can bright lights make you more emotional?

That’s the question researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Toronto, Scarborough set out to answer in a recent study. The study, titled “Incandescent affect: Turning on the hot emotional system with bright light”, originally appeared in the journal for Consumer Psychology, and draws a link between feelings and lighting.

It has long been thought that bright light, especially sunshine, has a positive effect on mood. Consistent exposure to light helps us regulate our circadian rhythms, which can make us happier and healthier overall. It stands to reason that data would suggest that bright light would lead to an increase in positive emotion.  However, this new study had unexpected results.

Instead of finding correlation between light and positive moods, the new research shows that bright light can increase the intensity of ALL emotions, including negative ones. Participant’s reactions, under different lighting conditions, were rated to a number of stimuli ranging from the spiciness of certain foods to perceived attractiveness and aggression of other people.  Researchers, Alison Jing Xu and Aparna Labroo, found that bright lights increased the severity of the participants’ visceral responses to the stimuli. They reported, “we show that ambient brightness makes people feel warmer, which increases the intensity of their affective response, including sensation seeking from spicy-hot foods, perception of aggression and sexiness (“hotness”) in others, and generating more extreme affective reactions toward positive and negative words and drinks.“  This was found across all six studies that were conducted.

So bright light tends to make people react more passionately, while dim lights can lead to people having subdued reactions. Why is this the case? According to the findings, “these effects arise because light underlies perception of heat, and perception of heat can trigger the hot emotional system.” This connection between our body’s perception of warmth and feelings of passion makes sense; our language is full of phrases like “hot-headed” and “hot and bothered” that associate heat with feelings of intense emotion.

How can we use this information to our benefit? “Turning down the light,” Xu and Labroo write, “effortless and unassuming as it may seem, can reduce emotionality in everyday decisions, most of which take place under bright light.” Keeping lights dim might help prevent us from making snap judgments and allow us to make more rational choices.

Do you plan to turn down the lights the next time you have a big decision to make? Let us know in the comments!