Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Empathy Emptiness

Do you have emotional empathy for other people?

This seems like a no-brainer but research is now suggesting that people who have had severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) have a loss of emotional empathy , which is the ability to recognize and understand the emotions of other people.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales, conducted a study to investigate whether physiological responses to emotions are connected to emotional empathy.

PsychCentral reported that the team used electromyography and skin conductance to analyze two groups of adults, one with severe TBI and a healthy control group, focusing on the participant’s facial muscle and sweat glands while they viewed happy and angry facial expressions.

“The results of this study were the first to reveal that reduced emotional responsiveness observed after severe TBI is linked to changes in empathy in this population…,” said study author and doctoral candidate Arielle DeSousa.

What are your thoughts on Emotional Empathy or the lack thereof?

Emotional Masks

Who’s the best at hiding their emotions?  Well, take a look at the video below, which delineates the most popular society at masking their emotions.  It is not Brits as one might suggest.

Dr.  David Matsumoto, microexpression expert, comments on why this might be so prevalent in Japanese society.

He suggests that because it is such a populated country, people need to cooperate with one another to live amicably.

Instead of seeing anger or sadness, Japanese people neutralize those emotions to live harmoniously.  This can be seen in the Japanese martial arts as well, where control over one’s emotions and actions as well as having an acute observation of their opponent is crucial for victory.

This is tantamount to America’s poker players who try to mask their emotions at all costs and benefit from being able to read their opponents emotions/body language.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Believability in Sender Demeanor

New research, conducted by Human Communication Research , suggests that sender demeanor may be the most influential source of variation in deception detection judgments.

Sender Demeanor is the difference in the believability of a message sent by a “sender”, which is independent of the actual honesty of the message.

In this study, published in Human Communication Research, Volume 37, Number 3, July 2011, sender demeanor induction explained as much as 98% of the variance in detection [of deception] accuracy.

Does the person not the message have a greater impact on what one believes?

Three additional studies investigated the behavior profiles of believable senders.  The results suggest a strong impact of sender effects in deception detection.

Do you think that it is too early in the research stage to say that a sender’s believability is the most influential source of variation in deception detection?