Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Laugh At Yourself!

Most people have heard the old adage, ‘laughter is the best medicine’.  But could you truly enjoy a good laugh if it was at your own expense?  Many of us think we could and want to but do we really have the sense of humor that allows us laugh at ourselves?

Ursula Beermann, from the University of California Berkeley, and Willibald Ruch, from the University of Zurich,  studied 70 psychology students and gauged their ability to laugh at themselves.

However, this study was not all fun and games.  Research has linked optimism and laughter to improved health.  Understanding humor can be very important in one’s health and could shed light on conditions such as autism where the social skills required in recognizing jokes and the nuances used in certain jokes are lacking.

According to TIME Healthland, the study found that an individual’s ability to laugh at themselves had no bearing on how often they could laugh in response to the silly images of others. This implies that the ability to laugh at oneself is linked with our individual mood and personality.

Research Digest reports that Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System was used to decode the participant’s facial expressions looking for signs of true Duchenne smiles, which are symmetrical and involve creasing of the eye muscles.

80% of the participants flashed a genuine smile, but it was those that claimed to be able to laugh at themselves, and whose friends agreed with that statement, who displayed more frequent and intense smiling and laughter in response to silly images of themselves.

Therefore, being able to laugh at yourself is a distinct trait and linked to an upbeat personality.  Participants who were able to laugh at themselves were more cheerful and less serious overall.

What are your thoughts on this study?

Can a good sense of humor be learned or is it completely inherent?

Faking It

In an article posted on Global Winnipeg, forensic psychologist, Leanne ten Brinke, analyzes news footage and interviews of individuals, both male and female, who are addressing the “disappearance” of their loved ones.

Are they telling the truth or did they have a part to play in the disappearance?  Well, ten Brinke aims to find out.

What is her method of detecting deception?  Facial leakage as she terms it, which is a micro facial expression of emotion.  Liars, she affirms, cannot always control what their body reveals especially in their facial expressions.

When we try to hide information or contradict a fact our mind knows to be true then it “leaks” via micro facial expressions despite an individual’s best attempts to display otherwise.

Ten Brinke claims 90% accuracy in separating liars from truth tellers and purports that facial expressions are a strong predictor of a guilty party.  We previously blogged about a study that ten Brinke co-authored, which involved spotting genuine and contrived displays of remorse.

She points out that detecting deception via facial clues is not always black and white.  They are just a clue to consider when deciding if a particular line of questioning should be explored further and not an outright omission of guilt.

“There are certain muscles in the face that we’re not really able to control,” the psychologist states.  She points out that appearing sad requires both the upper and lower face to change at the same time.  Some people can only fake emotion in the bottom half of their face while the top part (i.e. eyebrows) remains unchanged.  She also notes that when sadness is faked, oftentimes people look surprised in their upper face.

Here is the link to a video that delineates the psychologist’s methods in analyzing behavioral clues in detecting deception.

The Language for Feelings

Many people are critical of our education system and we are discovering as the years pass that American children graduating from our school systems are not top notch competitively intelligent specimens of a super power such as the United States of America but are failing academically, socially and sometimes emotionally.

Many of us ask, why is this?  It is probably for a culmination of reasons.  How should we as a community, neighborhood and country deal with this impending crisis?

Well, Roots of Empathy, a program that teaches emotional literacy has found a way.

The Greater Good website reported on this program founded by Mary Gordon ,which has  successfully developed courses that aim to decrease aggression not just in our school systems but outside them as well.

Aggression is becoming more prevalent in America’s economically deprived school districts where many kids are raised in single or no parent families, have no money for the essentials in life and were not taught the social skills to deal with frustration or anger in a constructive manner.  Teaching, especially grade level curriculum, in this type of environment can be difficult to say the least.

Most of the issues with learning grade appropriate material  are not issues with teaching the student but with keeping their attention and avoiding social breakdowns or individual behavior breakdowns.  Gordon comments that most of us are worried about our traditional literacy rates when we should be more concerned about our emotional literacy, our ability to connect to ourselves and one another.  She reports, “…if we don’t teach them [disadvantaged children]to relate to others, they will be lost in life—lost in their relationships, they will not have success in their jobs, and we will not have peace in the world.”

An adult can be taught the educational lessons learned in grade school such as identifying the adverb or prepositions in a sentence or combining like constants in an algebraic equation  but real life lessons on communication and understanding yourself and others via empathy are not easily learned once you’re an adult.  These lessons are not taught in the classroom and appear to be vital in helping students that come from rough neighborhoods work with each other and not fight or misbehave.

Roots of Empathy, a classroom based program for children in kindergarten through eighth grade, involves bringing, to a classroom, an infant and observing its emotional reactions to the world around it.  They then address, as a group, what those reactions might be or why they are occurring.

For instance if the baby is crying and nothing seems to be the matter, maybe it is lonely and just wants to be picked up.  What would you do if you felt lonely?  How would you comfort baby X if he/she just seemed to be lonely?  How could someone comfort you?

Gordon points out that her “training” helps children understand that we all feel sad and lonely at times, but we can help one another.  In one of her programs a little girl all of a sudden said, “I felt sad when my mommy gave me away because we didn’t afford good food.”  Even an omission of a feeling in lieu of suppressing it and then having anger because of it can be beneficial to an individual.

She goes on to state, “I remember working with a group of teenage mothers who had all lived through sexual or physical abuse as children and were now struggling with addiction.  They had great difficulty empathizing with their children.”

Being empathetic might seem like a no brainer, but as Gordon illustrates, when you are not exposed to an environment that displays and encourages empathy, usually because of abuse or neglect, then it can be very difficult to give that empathy to someone else even if it is your own helpless baby.