Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Guess the Microexpression

Can you find the micro facial expression of emotion in the video below?

A microexpression is an emotional response that often occurs without our conscious awareness and reveals a person’s internal state. It is interesting to see it in an advertising campaign ad.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Take a look at this Faceology article on analytical interviewing.  Page three goes into more depth about this particular ad.

Maggie Pazian writes “We do not and cannot exactly know the cause of the microexpression without engaging Dr. Tendler [the woman in the video above] in conversation and probing into the topic that appears to have spurred the emotional reaction but there is still important information that we can glean from seeing a microexpression.

As a side note, the emotion of disgust (as seen in the video above) is one of the seven basic emotions. To learn more about disgust, take a look at this blog article on disgust and disease.

What are your thoughts on this ad as well as microexpression in general?

Ask the Expert: Your Questions to Dr. Matsumoto Part 5

Humintell is happy to announce that the “Ask the Expert” series is back, with a fifth edition.

In the past we’ve posted several blogs with your (the viewer’s) questions to Humintell director Dr. Matsumoto and his answers.

Take a look at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 by clicking on the appropriate links.

Ask your specific question(s) to Dr. Matsumoto in the comments section above. The questions can be related to anything: microexpressions, facial expressions of emotions in general, culture, emotion, nonverbal behavior, reading body language, recent research or detecting deception.

Please no inappropriate questions! Don’t forget we monitor all questions asked on the blog and inappropriate questions will be deleted.

We’ll select certain questions we think are interesting, interview Dr. Matsumoto and post the responses within two weeks.

Thanks for your participation!

For more information on Dr. Matsumoto, visit his website. Don’t forget to follow him on facebook and twitter.

Our Brain and Facial Expressions

Recognizing facial expressions of emotion is no small task.  As simple as it may sound, many people find it difficult to understand how someone is really responding to their words or actions based upon facial expressions that sometimes only last a fraction of a second.

HindustanTimes reports on a study conducted by Dr. Lesley Fellows that focused on regions of the brain that are connected to face recognition and emotion processing skills.

What they found was that the area of the brain with the biggest impact on emotion recognition was the ventromedial PFC.

Dr. Fellows commented, “Patients with damage to the ventromedial PFC had a hard time distinguishing a neutral facial expression from emotional ones..Patients with left ventrolateral PFC damage recognized that an emotion was present in the expression, but had difficulty telling one emotion from another.”

The study’s findings, published in the Journal Cerebral Cortex, could help to understand some of the difficulties in social behavior seen in illnesses including certain forms of dementia, autism, or after a traumatic brain injury.