Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Out of the Corner of Your Eye

The role of peripheral vision in emotional recognition is crucial to our perception of the world.

This is the conclusion of exciting research by Dr. Fraser Smith of the University of East Anglia. Dr. Smith and his team looked at the ways in which our peripheral vision manages to capture expressions of fear, tying this with central questions related to the evolution of emotional recognition and basic emotions.

In an admittedly small study of fourteen participants, researchers displayed images of various emotions from either directly in front of faces to orientations to the left or right of their face. These images contained a baseline neutral expression as well as images of people demonstrating six basic emotions, and participants were asked to identify the emotion shown.

This set up was intended to see if participants were able to first detect an emotion and then recognize which one it was. Interestingly, there were significant differences between each emotion. Fear was easily detected but less easily recognized, while happiness and surprise were generally well identified.

Moreover, they found that rates of recognition differed significantly when images were moved to peripheral vision. The authors emphasized the implications for individuals who struggle to recognize emotions, such as autism, as this research seeks to better understand those relevant neurological pathways.

Dr. Smith summarized how the paper importantly related to social interactions, stating “We show that it is not just being able to recognise expressions that is important, but being able to detect them in the first place. This gives us a different picture of which underlying systems may be impaired, which has potential implications for treatment of conditions where perception of emotions is affected.”

Moreover, this research furthers our understanding of the evolutionary roots of emotions and emotional recognition. For instance, in a past blog we outlined how our subtle emotional processes creates a type of emotional “landscape.” This is the result of us synthesizing impressions of emotions, such as fear and disgust, and creating a general map of the world as it relates to those emotions.

These sorts of landscapes are fundamental in allowing us to navigate the world around us and are present in many animals besides humans. Similarly, the very notion of universal emotions can be seen as tied into our evolutionary experience with the world around us, and they are certainly shared by many apes and other non-human animals.

Dr. Smith’s research helps tap into these fundamental questions, in addition to questions of social interaction. If we implicitly recognize certain emotions and identify others, our brain is doing some very focused work based on that emotion, and this is likely rooted in the evolutionary importance of each emotion.

Similarly, it is not possible to separate these evolutionary questions from those relevant to social interaction, as Dr. Smith emphasized the fundamental nature of social interaction to our daily lives.

Certainly, we are hardwired to detect and recognize emotions, but these instincts are far from perfect. This is where Humintell comes in: to harness those processes and make you better able to read people and their emotions!

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.