Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Domestic Violence Awareness Month

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and while this topic may be an uncomfortable one, understanding domestic violence and how to detect and prevent it can save lives.

One way of achieving this is to better train law enforcement to identify signs of aggression and violence. This involves significant people reading and emotional detection skills, as we seek to learn what microexpressions betray that feeling of aggression. As Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang found, aggression is predicted by fleeting and unconscious but also very telling facial expressions.

This research, published in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management in 2014 relied on a series of four studies which consistently found that observers with training in law enforcement tended to reliably identify the facial signs that predict aggression and violence.

However, those without much experience witnessing or experiencing physical assaults did not tend to do well in selecting the expression that predicted violence. Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang attributed this to the reliance on stereotypical presentations of aggressive expressions, which tended to be incorrect.

Their studies also help map out exactly what the expression in question looks like, but this also grapples with the differences between types of aggression: premeditated and spontaneous.

For instance, the face of someone considering a premeditated assault is characterized by lowered brows, raised eyelids, and the tightening of lips. This appears as though they are seeking to control their expression of anger, evincing determination and concentration.

Such an expression must be contrasted with the “loss of control face,” which is seen in those who are about to attack after having just lost their temper. This expression also shows lowered brows and raised eyelids, but now the eyelids are even more starkly raised, creating a bulging, staring quality. Again, the lips are tightened, but the lower lip is not raised. The raising of the lower lip is often associated with efforts to control one’s emotions which is not present in this form of aggression.

So, how is this information helpful? And how does it relate to Domestic Violence Awareness?

Well, there are a couple lessons to draw from here. First, we have the potential to detect when someone is going to commit acts of aggression. Learning how to do this is important both for detecting when someone will attack us but also if someone is struggling to refrain from or is planning to attack others.

Second, without training, many of us are very bad at realizing this potential. While law enforcement officers were shown to be quite good at it across cultures, laypeople stand to gain a lot from a formal training procedure.

If nothing else, we hope that focusing on this potential can also help us become more aware of signs of aggression around us, for our benefit and for that of others.

*

For the month of October, save 30% on any deadly intent training course with code DVAM2019 when checking out! 

The Role of Anger in Pain

Over the past month, we have emphasized the expression and feeling of pain, but it is also apparent that pain and the seven basic emotions are closely intertwined.

It is specifically the connections between pain and anger that were explored in a 2008 study in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. In that study, Dr. Jennifer Graham and a team of researchers looked at the role of anger management interventions in helping those who suffer from chronic pain. This involved an experimental analysis of over one hundred pain patients who sought to grapple with the struggles of a chronic illness.

Their primary hypothesis that anger management can contribute to both emotional and also pain-related management makes sense given the common effects of chronic illness. Those struck with such a pain condition often face the prospect of losing their job and even their social support systems. This can cause and perpetuate a feeling of anger and unfairness.

Moreover, the search for effective interventions for chronic pain is a necessary and important goal. Many people who face chronic pain struggle to find sympathy amongst medical professionals, and past research indicates a marked increase in depression and anger following the onset of pain, which is not particularly surprising.

Building off this research, Dr. Graham and her team studied a group of 102 volunteers, all of whom had recently attended a pain center and experienced pain for at least the past six months, though on average, they had felt pain for around 3 years. After a series of assessments and intake interviews, each patient was randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group.

In this context, the treatment group was asked to complete a pair of writing tasks dedicated to expressing and grappling with feelings of anger, while the control group was given more emotionally neutral writing tasks. After completion of these tasks over 2.5 weeks, the subjects were interviewed again.

These interviews were then compared to see if volunteers reported differing levels of pain, personal control, and depression. The treatment group was found to have significantly reduced levels of depression and feelings of personal control after undergoing the writing process.

While unfortunately these efforts did not reduce pain, the connection between expressions of anger and improved mental health for those involved is striking. This suggests not only a benefit from expressing one’s emotions but also helps elucidate the complex ties between feelings of depression, anger, and pain.

It is important to be aware of people’s struggles with pain, which is why Humintell has dedicated this month’s blogs to Pain Awareness Month, and the role of anger in chronic pain shouldn’t be understated. As our past blog indicated, even medical professionals are terrible at recognizing genuine from faked pain, resulting in many sufferers of chronic pain struggling at being understood.

By learning to better understand people’s emotions, be it anger, sadness, or pain, we can act more compassionately towards those in their lives who do feel chronic pain. In the meantime, check out some of the past blogs for this month here and here.

An App for Pain Evaluations?

We know that humans are terrible at distinguishing real pain from faked pain, but could your smartphone just do that for you?

Building off of last week’s blog, it seems that some researchers have sought to implement the insight that computers are better at detecting genuine pain than doctors. In an exciting new study, the University of Pittsburgh’s Dr. Jeffrey Cohn sought to explore the potential of implementing machine learning techniques into an accessible software to read people’s subtle pain expressions.

Especially given current political trends and concerns as to the over prescription of opiates, doctors are under increased pressure to distinguish people who actually need medication for pain from those who are just faking in. This is helpful for doctors but also for patients as well. In fact, many patients, especially those who suffer from chronic pain, struggle to convince doctors that their pain is genuine.

If Dr. Cohn is right, however, future doctors can just pull out a smartphone and take a brief video of the patient’s face and expressions. With the app under development, a computer algorithm can match patients’ facial expressions to past video templates of people who suffer from genuine pain.

This algorithm was trained by analyzing a series of videos of people’s faces while attempting to complete manual tasks despite a shoulder injury. It tracked their winces and grimaces, creating a database of what facial expressions are most reliably caused by their feeling of pain.

Last week, we emphasized the factors that indicate deception, such as a lowered brow and raised cheeks, and Dr. Cohn’s work emphasizes that genuine pain is indicated by movement around the nose and mouth.

While these tips might help us think we can detect pain effectively, we have to recognize how fallible human efforts to detect genuine pain are, even for doctors. This fits into what we have long said about how difficult many forms of deception detection and microexpression reading are for those who are not trained in them.

However, the notion of using an app to read expressions is an exciting one, both for its practical benefits but also for the intellectual potential of driving forward our understanding of expression recognition. There is no reason why this sort of app cannot be used for other emotions.

In fact, last year we wrote about an app that used artificial intelligence to recognize our emotions. In that case, it was used to create emojis that could be sent online while still accurately representing our real facial expressions. With facial recognition technology like that, combined with a machine learning database similar to what Dr. Cohn used, the potential to use technology to enhance emotional recognition is exciting indeed.

There’s a balance, of course, in deciding how much we want to trust technology without learning these skills ourselves. While trained medical professionals may struggle at detecting genuine pain, that does not mean that training specifically in expression reading cannot help. Our time-tested and proven training programs are great evidence of your potential to learn how to do this on your own, especially because even a trained machine isn’t right all the time!