Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Left Vs Right: The Complexity of the Brain

New research is shedding light on how the left analytical and right creative hemispheres of the human brain work together in processing our visual world.

The fascination of how the brain process objective information is not new to the scientific scene.  Many TV shows such as Lie to Me and court drama series have been zeroing in on this via micro facial expressions of emotion and body language.

Assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, Ming Meng has come up with some interesting findings in regards to the brain’s organization of these two categories and the possible role they play in autism.

Meng uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), computer vision, and psychophysics to delve into the function of the brain and the processes of our visual world.

EurekaAlert.com commented on Meng and his colleague’s reserach, which was published on January 4th in the Proceedings of Royal Society B (online edition).  Meng’s research focused on how the brain is organized to process visual information particularly the human face.

“We needed to study the full spectrum; the stimuli that make an image look like a face but not necessarily a face. These results would show the subtle differences between the left and right side of the brain as they dealt with this range of images.” Meng noted.  Looking at how the brain processes faces is Meng’s key to unlocking the mysteries of the left brain/right brain paradigm.

The findings of his study as well as similar studies on the face shed light into the complex world of autism, people with face processing deficits, which also make understanding and recognizing emotions difficult.  Meng posits that the reason for social interaction problems especially among autistic children could be a problem with face perception.

“Our results suggest the left side of the brain is processing the external physical input which resolves into a ‘grey scale’ while the right brain is underlying the final decision of whether or not it is a face.”

What are your thoughts on this study?  Do you think it is compounding upon new information or just restating old facts?

Lie to Me is filled with “Lies to You” -Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan

Some of you may know the late Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan, who was a Professor Emeritus of the University of San Francisco.

Dr. O’Sullivan is widely known for her work with Dr. Paul Ekman on the “Wizards Project”, where they identified Truth Wizards. Truth Wizards are those that are exceptionally good at detecting deception. One of these truth wizards, Eyes for Lies, has a popular blog where she comments on current new events.

We came across this informative lecture by Dr. O’Sullivan where she speaks about the TV show “Lie to Me” and her career researching human emotion and lie detection.

Humintell director Dr. Matsumoto has also done research with Dr. O’Sullivan. Notably in 2008, they co-wrote a chapter in the Handbook of Emotion called Facial Expressions of Emotion. The chapter was written with other researchers Dr. Dacher Keltner, Dr. Michelle N. Shiota, and Dr. Mark Frank. You can read the complete chapter here.

Thanks to Steve for the link!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lie-detection biases among male police interrogators, prisoners, and laypersons

I know, I’ve been away a long time, finishing off my doctorate and working hard, so no time for blogging. The doctorate is finally out of the way but I still don’t have masses of spare time. When I can I’ll update these blogs with studies that catch my eye, though I don’t think I’ll be able to comment in depth on many of them in the way that I used to. That’s partly a time issue, but also I haven’t got access to as many full text articles as I did when I was registered at a university. I’ll do what I can.

Here’s a study that sounds like an interesting addition to the literature on what people think of their own lie-detection abilities:

E Elaad (2009). Lie-detection biases among male police interrogators, prisoners, and laypersons. Psychological Reports 105(3 Pt 2): 1047-56.

Beliefs of 28 male police interrogators, 30 male prisoners, and 30 male laypersons about their skill in detecting lies and truths told by others, and in telling lies and truths convincingly themselves, were compared. As predicted, police interrogators overestimated their lie-detection skills. In fact, they were affected by stereotypical beliefs about verbal and nonverbal cues to deception. Prisoners were similarly affected by stereotypical misconceptions about deceptive behaviors but were able to identify that lying is related to pupil dilation. They assessed their lie-detection skill as similar to that of laypersons, but less than that of police interrogators. In contrast to interrogators, prisoners tended to rate lower their lie-telling skill than did the other groups. Results were explained in terms of anchoring and self-assessment bias. Practical aspects of the results for criminal interrogation were discussed.

The full text is behind a paywall – I can’t find a direct link so you have to get there by going to the publisher’s website and searching their e-journals.