Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Special Announcement from Humintell!

We are really excited to let you know about the improvements we’ve made to our best selling MiX Original Microexpression Training Course!

Recently we obtained feedback from many of you who gave us amazing and wonderful tips on how we can improve our MiX Original. We took that feedback to heart and we’ve made a number of enhancements to the course.

Our new and improved MiX Enhanced will help all users be the best they can be at reading facial expressions of emotion.

Listen to Humintell Director Dr. David Matsumoto tell you more about those changes in the video below!

And see what some early users of MiX Enhanced are saying:

“There are many new faces to see. The new Humintell tool looks a bit more modern and smooth. For anyone who wants to practice their skills in recognizing microemotions, I highly recommend this new version.”

~Patrick L.

“I really like the difference. The interface moves smoother and it is quicker to answer, review, and learn. Great job you guys!”

~Jane D.

“Humintell has always been a pioneer in the field of Kinesics, yet again Humintell has blown us all away with a massive renovation to their Micro Expression training. Learn to recognize what you’ve always been seeing, try it today, you will never look at faces the same way again!”

~Urau L.

 

Dissecting the Expression of Disgust

A few weeks ago, we posted an article about the hapless kombucha drinker whose facial expressions went viral.

This week, we get the benefit of Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto’s insight into the details of her expressions. After trying kombucha, the video’s subject, Brittany Tomlinson, cycles through a rapid sequence of vivid facial expressions, providing a great example for us to learn how to recognize these expressions.

One of the clearest expressions is the one Dr. Matsumoto begins discussing at minute two: disgust.  The upper lip is raised, creating a horseshoe around the nose. Her lips are pursed, and her brow is wrinkled. Dr. Matsumoto suggest that much of this is her being thoughtful and attempting to process the experience.

This immediate reaction of disgust, he explains, is a sign of that universal human expression. But it is followed by a series of additional and quite distinct expressions, and many of these are also similarly reflective of universal expressions.

For comparison, Dr. Matsumoto also shares a video of his own grandson eating fermented beans, or rather trying not to eat them. There is a great example of the disgust expression around 6:30 in the video. Try comparing that to Tomlinson’s expression from the previous video!

Dr. Matsumoto’s discussion is just the briefest introduction to reading these expressions, but you’re in luck, because you can get even more information through Humintell’s training program!

Professionalizing Facial Features

We know that facial expressions hugely shape social interactions, but they also shape professional evaluations, as well.

A recent blog by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) critically examines the extant research on the connection between nonverbal behavior and professional evaluations. This article seeks to summarize the role that facial features, such as facial hair, eyebrows, and head tilts, have on others’ perceptions.

Perhaps the least controllable of these are facial features like width, or more specifically, the ratio between the width of our face and its height. While this may seem ridiculous, past research has consistently found a relationship between perceived anti-social tendency and facial width.

However, as the APS points out, this perception fails to hold with people that we have actually gotten to know. Still, it says something about the immediate, almost instinctive, process of emotional and facial recognition.

While facial width is not mutable, facial hair certainly is, and beards can have profound impacts on people’s perceptions of us. For instance, bearded men are more likely to be perceived as angry than their clean-shaven counterparts, but they are less likely to be perceived as sad or happy.

Despite the association with aggression, beards can also relate to positive evaluations of professional competence.

Certainly, this does not seem like a logical evaluation, but it does not have to be in order to have significant impacts on perception. Another such feature is, even more absurdly, eyebrows!

The role of eyebrows connects closely to our blog from last week, as they are emphasized and deemphasized along with various head tilts, and we know that head tilts have significant impacts on perceived dominance and strength.

However, what may have been missing from the study we blogged on last week, is the role of eyebrows in the importance of head tilts. While that study emphasized the importance of the eyes in the process, APS cites research performed by University of British Columbia psychologists who found that the effect of head tilt actually disappeared when eyebrows were removed from the image.

While we know that microexpressions and a host of nonverbal behaviors have profound impacts on social interaction, it is also important to look at the role of actual facial features, like facial hair, symmetry, and even eyebrows. As this research shows, those can have profound impacts as well.

Certainly, as APS emphasizes, these impacts can carry into the professional world. Traits such as emotionality may result in less positive evaluations of one’s competence, while perceived dominance will likely have the opposite effect.

Yet, it is not only the professional world that makes these evaluations salient. Even everyday interaction can be profoundly shifted by whether we are perceived as angry, dominant, or happy. Often, we might not even be aware of these evaluations, making sustained efforts to learn how to best read people’s non-verbal behavior that much more important.