Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Antisocial Behavior and Facial Recognition

We often tell children that bullies struggle with their own self-esteem, but they may also struggle with an even more fundamental skill!

Groundbreaking research suggests that those with severe antisocial behavior actually fail in properly recognizing emotions in other humans. A team of researchers from the University of Bath and the University of Southampton examined both male and female teenagers who had been diagnosed with conduct disorder, finding that they are often unable to detect emotion and rarely make eye contact.

Conduct disorders refer to a set of antisocial behaviors that often features dishonest behavior, theft, or even aggression towards people and animals. Due to the distrustful nature of many of those with these conditions, treatment can be extremely challenging, making further research into these conditions incredibly important.

The study authors analyzed a group of teens with conduct disorders as they attempted to identify emotions displayed through pictures and video clips. When compared to a control group, they found that the teens with conduct disorders were significantly worse at accurately identifying emotions, with the boys scoring even lower than girls.

Simultaneously, they analyzed the participants’ eye movements as they sought to recognize those emotions. While they did find that the participants tended to avoid looking at the eyes, this alone did not explain their lack of emotional recognition. Even when they did examine the eyes, those with conduct disorders still tended to score poorly.

Senior study author, Dr. Graeme Fairchild emphasized the importance of using these results to bolster treatment, saying “These findings could lead to the development of new treatments aiming to enhance emotion recognition and empathy or even prevention programmes for at-risk children.”

The idea of providing more effective treatment for conduct disorders resonates strongly given the ongoing challenges in this sort of therapy. Antisocial youth tend to be especially resistant to treatment and distrustful adults, making it even harder for therapists and children to address their behavioral difficulties.

Another interesting aspect of the study was its findings on gender differences: namely the fact that boys tended to perform worse than girls. This even held amongst the control group which lacked conduct disorders.

Another author, Dr. Nayra Martin-Key observed that “that interventions designed to improve emotion recognition might need to be tailored according to gender, with boys with Conduct Disorder needing a longer or more comprehensive intervention than girls.”

Perhaps the gender disparity is not surprising. In an earlier blog, we observed that there is a distinctive difference in emotional intelligence between boys and girls, rooted in the way they tend to be raised.

For more information on the role of eyes in emotional recognition, check out our blogs here and here!

Emotions vs Expressions

We know there are seven “basic” emotions, but aren’t there many more emotions?

In fact, there is significant difference between what emotions we experience and how our faces are able to express these emotions. While mountains of previous research have settled on the existence of seven basic emotional expressions, ongoing research seeks to quantify exactly how many emotions there really are

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, attempted to do just that. In a recent study, psychologists ran an extensive analysis with over 800 participants, attempting to provoke and record their range emotional expressions.

Each participant was exposed to a selection from more than 2000 short video clips, intended to trigger various emotions. These videos ranged from beautiful nature shots and romantic weddings to macabre images of human suffering and natural disasters.

The first group was shown 30 of these videos and was asked to simply write out whatever emotions they felt, garnering a vast range of self-reported descriptions. Then, a second group, again exposed to a selection of videos, was asked to identify their emotions from a predetermined list. This list ranged impressively from anger or anxiety to romance or triumph, but sought to give some common ground between individual reports.

Interesting, about half of the second group selected the same emotions after watching the same videos.

Finally, a third cohort was asked to rank their emotional experiences on a nine-point scale after viewing a series of 12 videos. While analyzing all three of these results through statistical models, the study authors found significant overlaps between reactions to a given video. When compiling all of these overlapped reactions, they were able to settle on a spectrum of 27 shared emotions.

However, the study authors cautioned that these different emotions were not entirely distinct. Senior author Dr. Dacher Keltner pointed out that “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration.”

Long-time readers of this blog will note the potential conflict between this expansive view of 27 emotions and the more limited view of seven universal basic emotions.

But, as Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto clarifies, this question is solved by distinguishing between experienced emotions and nonverbal expressions of these emotions. While we can feel a huge range of emotions, there are only so many facial expressions that humans universally use to express them.

Dr. Matsumoto’s distinction also explains another difference between emotions and expressions. The seven universal emotional expressions are distinct, separate categories. For example, the emotional combination of sadness and anger does not have a universal facial expression. On the other hand, emotions, as Dr. Keltner explained, are not so categorically distinct. Sadness and anger can overlap, making emotions more scalar and continuous than simply categorical.

To learn more about recognizing emotions and emotional expressions, check out Humintell’s training tool here!

Smelling Feelings?

If something smells awful, it’s because it’s disgusting, right? Maybe, but the truth is a little bit more complicated.

A recent study found that our immediate olfactory reactions to stimuli are heavily influenced by the emotional reactions of other people. This suggests that when we smell something bad, we may be picking up on people’s emotions just as much as the scent of the object. Such a conclusion would fit with previous studies which found a strong relationship between our senses and our emotions.

A team of researchers out of the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, examined whether exposure to happy and disgusted faces would affect participants’ reactions to various odors. Participants were shown images of either happy, disgusted, or neutral faces before being exposed to various scents.

Perhaps surprisingly, the participants reacted significantly differently depending on which expression they were exposed to. They rated scents more positively after seeing happy faces, while rating them more negatively after seeing disgusted ones. This held over the majority of scents, despite the odors varying drastically from caramel to human sweat. Only when exposed to the smell of feces did emotion fail to have an impact.

When combining these results with fMRI brain scans, the researchers were even able to identify the section of the brain responsible. They highlighted the role of the piriform cortex, in conditioning our response to a scent, even before we actually smell it.

These results may seem shocking. Don’t our senses simply tell us how the world is around us? Our very empirical skills seem challenged if our sense of smell has more to do with expectation than reality!

However, previous research into other senses has repeatedly found that emotions can influence our sensations, whereas sensations can similarly impact our emotions!

One 2011 study found that tired or overburdened participants actually perceived hills as steeper than those who were energetic or unencumbered. Similarly, happy participants considered their food as actually tasting better than sad ones, while fearful individuals ranked noises as louder and cliffs as higher. In each case, the emotions seemed to profoundly shape perceptions.

This relationship between emotions and sensations works the other direction too: many sensations can trigger certain emotions.

For example, our repeated exposures to certain scents can condition us to react in specific ways. This holds when ardent coffee drinkers immediately feel energetic and upbeat when exposed to the smell of coffee. This can happen even before a drop touches their lips.

After we repeatedly experience pleasure and energy from consuming coffee, our brains become accustomed to associating those feelings with the beverage and are then triggered by the smell, taste, or even sight of it! In a similar, though less uplifting fashion, the mere smell of fire can trigger a fear response in many people, even if they are perfectly safe.

For more information on the relationship between emotion and perception, check out our past blogs here and here!