Social Engineering Blogs

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Universal or Just Deceptive Emotions?

We spend a fair amount of this blog discussing the role of universal emotional expressions, but not everyone agrees.

Some emerging research, such as a recent study by Drs. Carlos Crivelli and Alan Fridlund, has begun to challenge some fundamental ideas related to the concept of basic emotions. This research questions whether facial expressions reflect emotions at all but instead reflect intentional social action.

For example, Dr. Crivelli has spent months interacting with indigenous groups like the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea and the Mwani of Mozambique. When many of these people are shown basic emotion expressions, Dr. Crivelli found that they declined to identify those expressions with emotions.

Instead, a smile was described as “laughing” or as a feeling of being in “raptured enchantment.” Dr. Crivelli noticed that these referred not to emotions as much as to behaviors and actions. He found similar results when replicating these analyses among the Himba people of Namibia or the Hadza in Tanzania.

Moreover, a 2017 meta-analysis found that often facial expressions are not representing the emotion we would thing they should be, based on basic emotion theory. Instead, co-author Dr. Rainer Reisenzein suggested that openly expressing one’s emotions could “[put] us at a disadvantage” in an evolutionary sense.

Dr. Fridlund emphasized a similar point, stressing that emotions have strategic social motivations. Perhaps individuals are not revealing inner states but are trying to convey a specific state to you, so that you will act accordingly.

While many would see this research as a challenge to the idea of basic emotions, this isn’t really the case. Instead, it just underscores the importance of both incorporating microexpression analysis and deception detection. Microexpressions are actually just basic emotional expressions that are displayed almost instantaneously.

These microexpressions are the key to seeing through the sort of deceptive expressions that the aforementioned studies discuss. Certainly, your peer may be using a facial expression in a way that doesn’t just display the emotion in question, but their emotion is not completely concealed. It comes out in the form of a microexpression.

Still, this new cultural research helps elaborate on two complexities. First, many researchers may take for granted that the presence of expressions as showing underlying emotions. Such perceptions must take into account the possibility that others’ expressions are being used instrumentally.

Second, we must revisit the perennial issue of how to contextualize basic emotions into the admittedly distinctive manifestations that we see across cultures. Instead of speaking in terms of underlying emotions, some indigenous groups can simply describe the behaviors. What does this say about deception in those cultures? About emotional openness?

These are even more reasons to see what Humintell can do to better let you read microexpressions and to allow us to incorporate cultural differences into our people reading.

The Science of Gratitude

Why do we feel gratitude anyway?

Gratitude seems like an incredibly central emotion in our interactions with other humans, and there is good reason for that! In past blogs, we have written about how critical cultivating gratitude can be in promoting healthy relationships and even in ensuring good physical health. Building on this research, a new study by Dr. Hongbo Yu and his team dug deeper into the neurological mechanisms at play and the fundamental role of gratitude in interpersonal interactions.

In this groundbreaking research, Dr. Yu and his team sought to use MRI machines to map out which regions of the brain were particularly active while the participant was feeling gratitude.

While past work has also sought to do this, this project was novel in trying to map out antecedent emotions, such as prosocial and reciprocal behaviors and cognitions, as well as the behaviors following feelings of gratitude.

In order to better understand these concepts, they recruited a series of 36 participants and asked them to engage in a series of activities. In each of these, participants were asked to subject themselves to a brief electric shock in exchange for receiving a monetary bonus.

Following this initial stage, participants underwent brain scans to map out relevant brain regions before engaging in “help-receiving tasks.” Here, participants were paired with fellow subjects. While one individual was to receive mild pain, their compatriot was asked to spend money to relieve their other’s suffering.

Importantly, participants were asked to decide exactly how they would behave while still undergoing the MRI brain scans. This tracked cognitions like whether they planned to help, but also the reaction of a participant to learning that they will be relieved of the pain by a stranger.

In analyzing the results, Dr. Yu’s team was able to compile a computational model that can help guide further research into this emotion. Moreover, the processes identified are not necessarily tied to gratitude alone but could be further connected to other cognitive mechanisms.

This leads to the exciting possibility that this study is a building block into larger attempts to map out cognitive processes and emotions by the neurological activity at play. Certainly this could have widespread ramifications for the study of psychology and on efforts to better read people.

The authors conclude by expressing hope that this study “serves as a role-model for investigation of the neurobiological basis of other complex emotions and their significance in social-moral life.”

But how is this helpful to better reading people? First, the study helped better understand how emotions are constructed and then converted into behavior. By understanding these processes, researchers are better able to apply neurological insights to everyday behaviors.

Threat Assessment and Management for Venue Security

By Dr. David Matsumoto

As the target article mentions, many security measures can and should be put in place in a multi-layer approach to comprehensive security. Security professionals should consider as many different possibilities as possible in order to provide maximum security in order to harden targets. Hardening targets lessens the possibility of being attacked in the first place and makes responses to attacks when they happen more effective. Hardening targets also helps prevent attacks from happening because perpetrators often choose softer targets. All such measures contribute to being what is known as “left of bang” – assessing threats and mitigating them before an incident occurs.

Many (but not all) of the possible layers of security to consider involve the assessment of behavior. These can include the behaviors of attackers as they are actively engaged in committing a malicious act, as they deceive security personnel about their intent, or as they cover their operational tracks and personal security concerns. Thus, the assessment of behavioral indicators becomes of utmost importance in these aspects of security.

But the incorporation of behavioral assessment of threats begs the question of exactly which behaviors to assess. And where can security professionals turn in order to find these behaviors? For us the answer to these and similar questions is simple – security professionals should rely on validated behavioral indicators.

What does “validated” mean? In science, there are many types of validation. For our work in the security field, two types of validation are the most important. One involves the use of carefully constructed experiments that isolate specific behaviors that are consistently and accurately related to mental states related to threats. Laboratory-based, experimental validation is important because these are the only types of efforts that can isolate specific behaviors and their associations with meaningful mental states underlying threat and malicious intent.

But experimentally based, laboratory research is not the only type of validation that is required. What is also required are field validation efforts, in which operators trained in the specific behavioral indicators generated from laboratory research actually use those indicators in the field and document their utility.

We believe that both of these types of validation are important. Some behaviors may be experimentally validated in the laboratory but of no utility in the field. Other behaviors may catch an operator’s eye and suggest to him or her that they “work.” (And there have been many books and other media of former operators claiming they have the goods on THE indicators.) But those potential indicators should really be tested in controlled studies.

One good example is gaze aversion. Many security professionals, and laypersons around the world, believe that people avert their gaze – don’t look you in the eye – when they are lying to you. But this is a myth. Many studies have actually tested this specific behavior, and the vast majority of them have not found and empirical support for this claim. Consequently, training security professionals to be on the alert for gaze aversion in security interviews can be misleading, with potentially deadly consequences.

Our training solutions powered by Humintell rely only on validated behavioral indicators of threat – indicators validated not only in controlled experimental research but also in field use by actual operators whom we have trained. The training solutions we provide are unique because we bridge both worlds – state-of-the-art research and real world, practical experience. We employ both world-renowned scientists and security personnel with decades of experience. It is this unique combination of science and practice that can help us help security professionals be ahead of the curve in identifying threats and mitigating them, keeping them left of bang.

This article originally appeared on https://parminc.com/2018/05/14/threat-assessment-and-management-for-venue-security-the-importance-of-validated-threat-indicators/