Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Analyzing Nonverbal Behaviors

In the interview below by DeCodeur du Non-Verbal on analyzing nonverbal behaviors, Dr. Matsumoto was asked by French body language consultant Romain Collignon, about how he got started in analyzing nonverbal behaviors and expressions of emotion.  See Dr. Matsumoto’s response below.

“As an undergraduate, I was initially interested in how children (ages 3-5) could understand their parents’ emotional states even though they could not understand their words. Therefore I decided to delve into this and do a research a project on how preschoolers can understand emotions expressed in  para linguistic cues and not words.“  This is what started Dr. Matsumoto’s path into the research of Cross-Cultural Communication and Nonverbal Behaviors.

Upon a trip to Japan for Judo training, Dr. Matsumoto ended up collecting additional data on nonverbal cues and when he returned was able to do a cross-culture study on judgments of nonverbal behavior, which he then pursued in graduate school at UC Berkeley and continues to conduct research in today.

“There are some professions where it is very useful to learn about microexpressions because one wants to gain an edge in understanding how a person is actually feeling.  In those professions learning microexpresssions is useful.“

Click here to view the embedded video.

 

To Listen to the Entire Interview click Here.

The Victor’s Stance

hi-judo-anger-852-jpgIn recent years there has been much talk about the stance a winner takes after a competition.  Originally labeled as pride, this “victory” stance has been studied by many researchers.  With the winter Olympics just around the corner it is prudent to note new research findings for the triumphant body language of the victor’s stance.

Time Magazine reports on the new findings from researchers at San Francisco State University that suggest the victory stance may be inherited and that athletes instinctively display this “aggressive dominance” over their opponent.

“It raises interesting questions about the history of sports in general,” says Dr. David Matsumoto, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at the university, “They are rarified forms of competition, and there is something very basic and primal about sports that lends itself nicely to these reactions and keeps them alive.”

Matsumoto became aware of the ubiquitousness of this posture during his years as the U.S. Olympic coach for judo.  “What I saw everyday in training and in competition had nothing to do with pride,” he says. “It’s all about just having clobbered somebody. It’s a sign or signal given to other members of the community who are watching.”

He goes on to note that it’s likely an evolutionary trait, based on a need to express triumph, and dominance – and that it was something instinctive, that athletes weren’t even aware of conscious of doing.

From his previous work, Matsumoto coded these behaviors as expressing dominance rather than pride.  This was due to the fact that pride tends to be more reflective involving more gentle and internally directed behaviors. It also occurs at least a few seconds after the victory.

Dr. Matsumoto and his colleagues to studied video of Olympic judo medal matches and zeroed in on the athletes’ very first reactions after the match was over. CBC News  reports that the researchers reviewed more than 35 athletes from different countries, including congenitally blind competitors in the 2004 Paralympics.  Their report published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, they found that victors consistently engaged in any of a number of dominance behaviors, including throwing their hands up, expanding their chests, shouting, making fists, or pumping the air. The losers in the matches never exhibited such reactions, instead keeping their heads down and averting their gaze from those nearby.

The same effect was documented among Paralympic athletes who were born blind, and never had the opportunity to observe these dominance displays. “This is a phenomenon that is occurring in people all around the world, in people who are blind and never saw it happen,” he says. “There is something wired in us to do that at that particular moment.”

 

Society Teaches us that Women are Untrustworthy?

Standing Focus    Role Reboot: Culture & Politics reports on how society is teaching our kids that women lie.

So how exactly are we teaching children that women lie and can’t be trusted to be as competent or truthful as men?

The article comments that lessons about women’s untrustworthiness are in our words, pictures, art, and memory.  They purport that women are overwhelmingly portrayed as flawed, supplemental, ornamental, or unattainably perfect and that it is easy to find examples of girls and women routinely, entertainingly cast as liars and schemers.

For example, on TV we have Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Don’t Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23, Devious Maids, and, because its serpent imagery is so basic to feminized evil, American Horror Story: Coven.

They point out that the lessons start early at an early age noting the popular animated kids movie Shark Tale, which featured the song “Gold Digger,” a catchy tune that describes women as scheming, thieving, greedy, and materialistic. There is no shortage of music lyrics that convey the same ideas across genres. It’s in movies, too.

A few examples:

“Amongst all the savage beasts none is found so harmful as woman.” — John Chrysostom

“What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. One must be on one’s guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil.” — St. Albertus Magnus

“Women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” — Martin Luther

“I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” — Augustine

It is important to note that men are often times not portrayed in the best light by female singers and can be paralleled to heart breakers, etc.

These thoughts are alive and well and have a super long tail outside of religion & music: domestic work, pay discrimination, and sex segregation in the workplace. Every time a young girl can’t serve at an altar, or play in a game, or dress as she pleases; every time she’s assaulted and told to prove it, it’s because she cannot, in the end, be trusted. Controlling her—her clothes, her will, her physical freedom, her reputation—is her responsibility and not most often an unalienable right.

Children learn so quickly and normatively to follow society’s’ norms; do we really want the distrust women to be one of those?  We need to teach our younger generations to always challenge ideologies that go against our better judgment. It means critically assessing the comforting institutions we support out of nostalgia, habit, and tradition. It could also mean not buying certain movie tickets, closing some books, refusing to pay for some music, and politely disagreeing with friends and family at the dinner table.

What do you think of the portrayal of women, are they depicted as untrustworthy?