Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Cleansing Your Body Cleanses Your Mind

Feeling guilty about that carmel macchiato you just gulped down, having doubts about the job you just interviewed for, or feeling a little seasonal depression?  Well, just jump into the shower or suds up your bath and clean your body.

Yes that’s right, cleansing your body can cleanse your mind.  US News Health has reported that researchers at the University of Michigan revealed that hand-washing and bathing help people rid themselves of emotional baggage.

Their findings were a review of past studies and were published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.  An interesting link between cleanliness and our minds is that in past studies people judged others more harshly for moral wrongs when they were in a messy room or exposed to a bad odor.

Just remember, there is always two sides to every coin, and people who think they are clean (key word think) also tend to believe they are morally superior to others.  As we all might have experienced, this is not always the case.

Another query to ponder, what about those of us who are constantly washing our hands or worrying about germs.  Well, a different study revealed that people feel less guilty when they think of something immoral they had done if they used an antiseptic wipe.

Researcher Spike W.S. Lee. points out, “Cleansing is about the removal of residues.  [It also] removes the residual influence of earlier experience.”  That last remark applies to both happy memories and bad ones the researchers purport.

What are your thoughts on the researcher’s findings?  Does cleansing your body help you also cleanse your mind?

FEAR- Is It Really Mind Over Matter?

“The only thing we have to fear is Fear itself”, Franklin D. Roosevelt (inaugural speech, 1933).

Fear can be a motivator or a crippling disease that keeps one from trying something new or difficult.  Most of us can explain the emotion of fear, can recognize the facial expression of fear and can recount a time when they have personally experienced fear.

But how does fear really work?

Most of us have at one time or another experienced, what society has linguistically termed,  fear. But biologically speaking how does fear make us act the way it does?  According to  io9.com: neuroscience , science knows how our brains process fear, but all the neural underpinnings of fear still remain a mystery.

Fear is one of the seven scientifically proven universal facial expressions of emotion.  The universal trigger of fear is a threat to one’s well-being.  The brain processes fear with the amygdala, almond-shaped clusters of neurons deep in our medial temporal lobes.

It has long been believed that the amygdala played a role in processing fear, how big a role had been undetermined until now.  A 1939 study revealed that removing the temporal lobes entirely (this includes the amygdala and connective fiber tissues within the lobes) made primates more tame, less aggressive and less responsive to fearful situations.

In another study in 1952, it was discovered that taking out only the amygdalae had the same effect of the disappearance of fear.  However, there has not been any revealing evidence of the effect of such a procedure on a human.

The ever increasing advancements in technology have allowed science to delve deep into the brain and focus on particular regions without causing collateral damage to adjoining regions of the brain.  In their review, “Neuropsychology of Fear and Loathing”, published in the journal Nature neuroscentists Andrew Calder, Andrew Lawrence and Andrew Young made observations about the the scientific strides in understanding the processing power of the amygdala and fear in the human brain.  They attribute advancements such as the fMRI for the ability to safely probe deeper into certain portions of the brain without damaging other portions.

The most popular human case study has shown that there is quite a difference between perceiving fear and having the ability to experience fear via brain signals (i.e. fight or flight response).  It was recently published, in January of 2011, and conducted on a human with Urbach-Wiethe disease (renders her amygdala useless).  The study revealed that the amygdala is a pivotal area in the brain for triggering (experiencing) fear.

What are your thoughts on fear?

Some people like to experience mild fear (just look at Halloween thrill seekers) and some people can’t stand the idea of being frightened, even if it is only a fleeting emotion.

What would you do if you couldn’t experience fear?  Would that be a bad thing or would that perhaps be beneficial?

Why Laughter is Such Good Medicine

The New York Times reports on why laughing is so good for us.

Although laughter seems like a relative simple concept, the effect it has on our bodies is anything but simple.  Research has shown that laughing more can make us happier (overall), slimmer, and healthier.

“Laughter is an early mechanism to bond social groups,” Dr. Robin Dunbar,  an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford said. “Primates use it.”  He suggests that it is not the intellectual pleasure of humor but the physical act of laughing that is beneficial.  The muscle movements involved in laughing cause the brain to produce endorphins and that causes us to feel good.  Endorphins are pain relievers and stress reducers.

Dunbar and his colleagues tested resistance to pain in five sets of laboratory studies and one field study at comedy performances.  The studies results, which are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences, provided an answer to the conundrum of whether we laugh because we feel giddy or we feel giddy because we laugh.  They also showed that the resistance to pain was not the result of an overall well-being but was from actual laughter.

There is a suggestion that social laughing was originally a part of social grooming, which promotes closeness in a group.  “Panting is the sound of rough-and-tumble play,” Dr. Provine said of primate play. It becomes a “ritualization” of the sound of play. And in the course of the evolution of human beings, he suggests, “Pant, pant becomes ha, ha.”

Dr. Dunbar agrees and purports that laughter may have been favored by evolution because it helped bring human groups together, the way other activities like dancing and singing do.