Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Hearing Emotions

New research suggests that emotions such as anger, sadness, and happiness are expressed in the same way in music and movement across cultures.

 Live Science reports on this interesting discovery.  In the past, scientists have found that animals like different music than humans and that music stimulates the same part of our brain as food, sex, and love.  The study is outlined in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers asked  Dartmouth undergraduates and members of a remote Cambodian hill tribe to use sliding bars to adjust traits such as the speed, pitch, or regularity of music.  Interestingly, both groups used the same types of characteristics to express primal emotions.  The study also found that the same types of patterns were used to express the same emotions in animations of movement in both cultures.

Outside observer Jonathan Schooler, a professor of brain and psychological Sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara,  said, “The study suggests why music is so fundamental and engaging for us.  It takes advantage of some very, very basic and , in some sense, primitive systems that understand how motion relates to emotion.“

Thalia Wheatley, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth University, says that the team traveled to the remote highlands of Cambodia to verify if this trend held across cultures. They asked 85 members of the Kreung tribe to perform the same task as the Dartmouth students.

Interestingly, the Kreung tended to put the slider bars in roughly the same positions as Americans did to capture different emotions, and the position of the sliders was very similar for both music and emotions.  Wheatley pointed out that none of the tribes’ people had any exposure to Western music or media,

“Emotion is the same thing no matter whether it’s coming in through our eyes or ears.“

Culture and Body Language

Body language, unlike one of the seven facial expressions of emotion, is not universal.  In fact, research has shown that it is culture specific.

myGuidon.com writes that many of our body movements and gestures are culturally determined, some gestures have different meanings in different cultures. What can be seen in one culture as a compliment is often taken as an insult in another culture.

With our internationally connected world it is important for the business traveler, teacher, psychologist, doctor etc. to understand that one culture’s set of acceptable body language gestures or movements may not be interpreted the same way in a different culture.

One can simply look at the greeting style of various cultures to see this cultural discord come to life.  There are huge differences between the way Americans, Asians, and Middle Eastern people greet each other.

When dealing with cultural differences or a difficult cultural encounter Knowledge Is the Key!

Humintell’s IntelliCulture has a section devoted to gestures of different cultures and what they mean.  If you encounter individuals from varying cultural backgrounds, you would benefit from this cross-cultural adaptation tool.

 To read  more about gestures and how they are received in varying countries  read the entire article.

 Use Coupon Code:  COMP15 to receive 15% off your IntelliCulture purchase.

Emotions and Social Networks

We’ve all either have told someone or have been told by someone that “this is not personal it’s business”.  The concept of keeping personal stuff personal and work stuff at the workplace is now becoming a thing of the past.

According to the Business Insider you can now throw caution to the wind and blur the lines.  They report that our emotions aren’t controlled anyway (even if we are trying to control them) and are already affecting our co-workers.  A recent Gallup Poll analysis shows that our well being has an impact on the people we work with and on the people who work for us.

The poll’s results suggest that emotion travels over social networks in much the same way viruses do.

The study included 105 teams and 1,740 individuals whose well being was measured in three six-month intervals. The average team size was 22 members, and the minimum team size was five members.

Researchers Nicholas Christakis M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and James Fowler, Ph.D., showed in additional research that emotion travels over social networks in much the same way viruses do. Harter purports, “Based on this previous research, we expected to see that the well being connection within teams would be much stronger than that among employees who were not members of the same team.  But the surprising finding was that the relationship between supervisors’ well being and that of their direct reports grew substantially over time.”

The study’s results suggest that the mental state of a person’s boss will influence the individual’s mental state; therefore, an employee’s attitude is a direct reflection of their boss’ attitude.  So, being a good boss has a positive and most likely productive influence on the company.  Whereas being a negative boss will have a negative impact on the company.

Agrawl, a gallup research manager, expounds, “…meaning that individuals are likely influenced by the shared culture of their team.”  Harter continues, “There is plenty of evidence that wellbeing is shared within existing formal and informal networks and that it spreads based on social ties. ”

What kind of boss do you have?  Does your workplace attitude reflect your boss’ attitude?