Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Greed or Gratitude?

In the midst of holiday season, it is easy to get caught up in the festivities and ignore something fundamental: your emotions.

As Dr. Catherine Franssen writes in the Huffington Post, the anticipation and receipt of gifts are both deeply tied with neural pathways that make us feel pleasure. This can be great, making us feel terrific, but it can also change our brain and outlook if we become disappointed. Instead of giving into this cycle, Dr. Franssen advocates the cultivation of another emotion: gratitude.

The desire to acquire pleasurable items is rooted in our hereditary need to obtain objects which might be crucial to survival. In Dr. Franssen’s view, humans evolved with this desire in order to drive them to more effectively search out food, shelter, or other necessary goals.

This resulted in greed, or the desire to possess something new, to become linked neurologically with the release of dopamine. This chemical, when released into the pleasure centers of our brain, quite simply makes us feel good. However, it also makes us want more and more to the point that modern humans often get addicted to the behaviors that reliably reward them with dopamine.

Unfortunately, reliance on these behaviors can change our brains as we adapt to the inevitable disappointment that arises when rewards do not materialize. This can lead to a deep level of stress, mistrust, and agitation, along with distinctly weakened immune systems.

With this in mind, take a look at the way people often behave around holiday season, especially given the crucial role of presents in most major winter holidays. The anticipation of being given a present or of eating rich food releases dopamine just as reliably as the achievement of those desires. At the same time, it is easy to be disappointed if the reality doesn’t quite meet those expectations.

This puts great pressure on everyone who is expected to give great gifts or host fantastic parties, converting what could be a pleasant time with family and friends to a stressful neurological nightmare. This is even exacerbated by advertisers who take the chance to barrage you with progressively higher expectations.

But Dr. Franssen doesn’t denounce or dismiss the holidays! On the contrary, she sees this time of the year as a perfect opportunity to practice gratitude. This involves affirming the positive impact of other people and showing thanks for it. She encourages each of us to cultivate feelings of gratitude, especially around the holidays, by affirming the positive support of other people in our lives and focusing on those relationships over material items.

Humintell has previously emphasized this very same point by describing the positive effects of gratitude on the mind and also on your health! We recognize that it isn’t as simple as this blog might make it sound, but there are many ways to improve your holiday experience either through mindfulness and meditation or by simply shifting your focus away from material consumption.

Either way, we wish you the happiest of holiday seasons!

The Case for Musical Emotions

For many people, listening to music is a deeply emotional experience, but does that tap into universal emotions?

In a 2016 study, psychologist Heike Argstatter sought to determine whether universal basic emotions are recognizable in music across cultures. This built on her previous research which found that, within one Western culture, both trained musicians and laypeople consistently categorized the same musical sequences into categories based on the same basic emotions. Now, Dr. Argstatter sought to extend these findings to audiences in disparate cultural settings.

The study began by selecting two Western groups, from Germany and Norway, as well as two sets of non-Western participants from Indonesia and South Korea. They were then played the same musical sequences used in Dr. Argstatter’s previous work, given that this music was clearly recognized as evocative of basic emotions.

Even the written descriptions of each track in Dr. Argstatter’s study evoke strong emotions. For instance, the “anger” music is depicted as loud, fast, and showcasing rising volume or rapid fire (staccato) notes. Alternatively, the music intended to evoke happiness tended to avoid dissonance and feature an uplifting or dance-like tempo.

Overall, Dr. Argstatter found evidence that all participants, regardless of culture, would identify the same emotions in the same pieces of music. This was especially true for happiness and sadness.

However, there were marked differences between cultures, as well. For instance, one of the tracks evoking “surprise” was actually interpreted as “happiness” by the Norwegian, Korean, and Indonesian participants. Similarly, “disgust” music was classified in various ways as angry, sad, or frightening, though interestingly never happy.

Still, there were some systemic cultural differences, in that the German participants and, to a lesser degree, the Norwegian ones were consistently more likely to identify the music with its intended emotion.

Dr. Argstatter saw this as demonstrating a consistent “in-group advantage,” writing “This phenomenon is known as in-group advantage: emotional cues (e.g., faces or vocal stimuli) are better recognized if the stimuli and the participants stem from the same culture.”

It is important to note that this is not inevitable but takes some work to break through. Universal emotions, as discussed at length in this blog, are displayed in similar ways across many cultures. However, this study provides valuable insights into exactly how cultural differences do change the way emotions are expressed or recognized.

Thankfully, the study of cross-cultural differences is a specialty of the folks here at Humintell! We offer comprehensive training in improving your ability to read emotions across cultures and in communicating regardless of cultural differences.

What Makes a Good People Reader?

Humintell is here to train you as a people reader, but is there anything that could make you naturally good at this skill?

It was this question which a team of researchers, including Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto, sought to answer in a 2014 study. This undertaking consisted of two experiments, one on college students with no prior professional experience in reading emotions, and another on professional behavioral analysts who work in law enforcement.

Before conducting the study, its authors hypothesized that basic attributes, such as age and sex, would have a significant impact on the ability to read microexpressions. Specifically, they predicted that women would outperform men, and that youth would correlate with better people reading.

More specific personality factors were also considered, such as the role of extraversion or openness to new experiences. Similarly, they sought to test whether previous formal training actually had a positive effect or if general confidence in one’s people reading ability helped.

In order to test these hypotheses, the researchers recruited a series of university students and, after giving them relevant personality tests, exposed them to a series of images showcasing various microexpressions and asked them to determine which emotion was being expressed. One group of participants were given no relevant microexpression training, while another group was trained prior to the study.

Of those participants with no training, younger participants who were ranked as being more open to new experiences tended to be more accurate. Interestingly, those who expressed less confidence in their abilities tended to do better as well.

This became reversed for those who underwent relevant training exercises, with the more confident participants excelling. For the post-training group, age was no longer a relevant predictor, but women who were more open to new experience performed the best. Overall, those given training were able to increase accuracy over those who were not.

In order to test the role of professional experience, a second experiment was employed. This time, professional behavior analysts from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were recruited to see what impact this background experience would have on successful microexpression detection. Again, half were given specific training before undergoing the experiment.

For those without training, age continued to be a factor with younger officers outperforming older ones. Moreover, those given additional training before the study were significantly better than their other TSA colleagues. Contrary to the first study, moreover, personality traits and gender proved unimportant.

Another surprising finding was that those with law enforcement backgrounds before TSA were actually worse at detecting certain emotions. The study authors speculated that this is because many signs of deception are poorly understood, even by those who practice lie detection every day.

This study began a difficult process in determining whether personality traits or background are more important in the ability to read microexpressions and was unable to decide this conclusively. However, what was clear was that formal training has a major impact. Even if you are confident in your ability, or you have had to practice lie detection at work, you may not be as good at microexpression analysis as you think!

But this is what Humintell is here for! If you want to hone your skills, there is no better way than by pursuing one of our microexpression analysis courses.