Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Facial Fascination

An Australian National University School of Art student, Martyn Jolly, states that the advent of technology such as social networking sites and facial recognition software has meant that the face is now a major part of how we transact our lives.

It is no secret that image is everything and that the younger generations can easily recognize a picture of famous singers and actors opposed to famous senators or politicians.

Martyn Jolly purported that, “facial recognition is now enmeshed in all this technology of publication and reduplication, and when we’re queuing at the supermarket checkout, we instantly recognize Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt…in a micro-second because of that big fundamental human need to use that space to communicate.”

He went on to state in The Canberra Times, in reference to the face as a major part of how we transact,  “There are psychological reasons, obviously, because it is the main communication interface between people, and facial expression is one of the few areas that actually is a universal language that is cross-cultural.”

An interesting tidbit about facial expressions is how many muscles contribute to human’s abilities to forge the seven universal facial expressions of emotion: fear, anger, contempt, happiness, surprise, sadness and disgust.

According to Curiosity from Discovery.com, there are 43 muscles in the human face, which are controlled by the seventh cranial nerve.  This nerve starts in the cerebral cortex, goes through your skull and stops in front of your ears.  The nerve then branches off in 5 separate sections creating the complex facial movements that humans are capable of making.

Here is a video of Dr. David Matsumoto discussing the origins of microexpressions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Compassionate Doctors are Healers!

Time Healthland.com , suggests that if doctors want to be successful, measured in terms of healthier patients, then they need to empathize more with their patients.

We all know the idiom “You reap what you sow!!” right?   If this is true, then why wouldn’t it pertain to the medical profession as well?  If you are kind to your patients, then they shall be kind to you and perhaps more willing to heed your advice.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Academic Medicine, better bedside manners along with more empathy for a patient’s ailments, led to better doctoring or at least better patient results.

Mohammadreza Hojat and his team of researchers of Jefferson Medical College, studied 891 patients treated for diabetes by 29 different doctors for 3 years.   Doctors were scored based on how much they understood their patient’s perspective and how much that understanding fueled their desire to cure the patient.

Empathetic doctor’s patients were 16% more likely to have control over their blood sugar and 15% more likely to have better cholesterol levels than patients of physicians with the lowest empathy scores.

So the old adage “kill them with kindness” really does work (even on diseases).  What do you think?  Is a physician’s empathy level really helping a patient heal?

Prior research purports that patients of highly empathetic doctors are more likely to follow their treatment plans, which could account for these differences.

I Cannot Spot a Lie

What does it say about a person if they cannot tell if someone is being sarcastic or lying?

Katherine Rankin, Ph.D., a member of the UCSF’s Memory and Aging Center and senior author of a recent study, suggests that it may be possible to spot people with particular neurodegenerative diseases early by looking for the telltale sign of their inability to detect lies.

UCSF’s website states that the ability to detect lies resides in the brain’s frontal lobe.  In diseases like frontotemporal dementia, an area that progressively degenerates because of the accumulation of damaged proteins, the frontal lobe plays an important part in complex, higher-order human behaviors.

Would the inability to detect sarcasm and lies actually match the brain regions hit early in these diseases?

The UCSF researchers focused on the fact that people with frontotemporal dementia often lose the ability to detect sarcasm and lies compared to a person who has Alzheimer’s .  The article goes on to purport that doctors have observed evidence of this for years.  People suffering from this disease sometimes lose significant amounts of money to online scams and telemarketers because of their blind trust.

175 seniors participated in this study and more than half had a neurodegenerative disease.  They were shown a video of two people conversing.  In the video one of the conversers would occasionally lie or use sarcasm, which was prevalent both in verbal and nonverbal cues.  The participants were then asked yes or no questions about the video. Patients with frontal dementia were unable to discern between sincere and insincere speech.  An interesting fact is that patients with Alzheimer’s disease fared much better.

News Medical also commented on this new research.  They state that frontotemporal dementia makes up about 5% of patients with dementia and tends to occur at a younger age (40-70) then say Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for nearly 80% of such patients.

“If somebody has strange behavior and they stop understanding things like sarcasm and lies, they should see a specialist who can make sure this is not the start of one of these diseases,” said Rankin.