Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Charles Darwin and Emotions

As The Irondequoit Post reports, nearly 150 years ago Charles Darwin used photographs to study how humans use their face to show emotions.

Today researchers at Cambridge University use the power of the internet, videos and the technology of the 21st century to update Charles Darwin’s experiments. They believe the results could help them develop emotionally-aware computers capable of understanding their users’ emotions.

Research over the past several decades has documented seven universally expressed and recognized facial expressions of emotion: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, contempt and disgust. This idea about universal emotions started earlier than you might think: Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) shared his ideas about the face and emotions in a book he wrote later in life, “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872). Darwin thought that all mammals showed emotion reliably in their faces.

If you are interested in Darwin’s work, check out http://www.darwin200.org/.

Emotion Quotient

Do you know your emotional quotient?

Greater Kashmir reports that emotion reveals a person in public through a wide range of physical changes and facial expressions.  It is also very difficult to hide your emotions especially microexpressions that flash on and off the face in a matter of seconds.

Emotions and moods are essential to our identity and existence as humans. However, its important to also note that moods are different than emotions.

Dr. Matsumoto defines emotions as immediate, automatic, and involuntary reactions to events that are important to us. Moods, on the other hand, are states of mind that may make us more predisposed to having a certain emotional response. For example, being in an irritable mood may make a person more predisposed to becoming angry more easily.

Author Nighat Hafiz, writes that individuals run through a series of emotions with different intensities and duration.  Moods and emotion are different from temperament and personality traits but a positive correlation cannot be ruled out. A hot tempered person’s trait of aggressiveness may reflect in his flickering moods and expression of anger. A calm person with his quality of soberness may afford to keep his mood pleasant in the worst situations.

To find out more read Hafi’z opinion piece “Emotions Make Us Human“.

The Language of Language

What do people unconsciously communicate through things such as intonation, accent and phrasing?  And is it really possible to detect a lie?

Well, that is exactly what computer science professor and expert in spoken language, Julia Hirschberg, is setting out to examine.  Things to take into consideration, according to Hirschberg, “How do people convey that it’s another person’s turn to speak? What do people mean when they say ‘okay’? There are so many different ways it’s used.”

Reported on PHYSORG.COM Hirschberg is working with Barnard psychologist, Michelle Levine and Andrew Rosenberg on her current research project that was funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study deception in speech across cultures.

In 2003 Hirschberg began her work with deception in speech, which is one of the largest collections of such data partly because, as she purports, it is so difficult to collect real lies in situations where the truth is known.

“The best liars are the people who tell the truth most of the time,” said Hirschberg, who received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.  This year, she received the International Speech Communication Association’s Medal for Scientific Achievement as well as the James A. Flanagan Award for Speech and Audio Processing from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

She hopes that her research will make great strides in the fields of security such as deception detection and language development.

What are your thoughts on this type of research? Do you think it is important to be able to delineate the signs of deceptions on a regular basis, or should such research findings be kept for science and security fields?  Could such research findings possibly impede our social relationships?