Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Emotions & the Human Body

stockvault-human-blood-circulation-circa-1911148446Emotions connect us as human beings.  We can be influenced by someone else’s emotions and often tend to unconsciously mirror the emotions around us.  Past research has shown that different cultures express or suppress certain emotions according to their traditions.

However, researchers in Finland, led by Lauri Nummenmaa of Aalto University’s School of Science in Espoo, have found that emotional outward expression appears to vary little across cultures.  That is when cultures do express  emotions they seem to not vary much.  This is different from cultures not normally expressing emotions due to the norms of a culture.

The Los Angeles Times gives examples of this:  with anger, fear or surprise, our heartbeat picks up in readiness for flight or fight, and so our chest feels tight. The muscles in our arms and legs feel clenched in anger, but in sadness, they feel limp. Happiness spreads its warmth even across the hips and genitals, but those areas typically go cold when we feel sad, angry or disgusted.

The findings compile information from five different experiments ranging in size from 32 to 305 subjects.  The participants linked seven different emotions with the same somato-sensory experiences with such consistency, it could not be a matter of chance.

An interesting fact is that the pairings participants made were consistent whether they were asked to react to emotionally suggestive words or to read short stories and view films that conjured strong emotional responses. Even when viewing photographs of a person’s face conveying a specific emotion, subjects drew maps of that person’s likely feelings that were consistently similar.

This suggests, according to the researchers, that people with emotional processing difficulties stemming, say, from anxiety, depression or psychopathy, may also “feel” their emotions in places different from those in good mental health. “Topographical changes in emotion-triggered sensations in the body could thus provide a novel biomarker for emotional disorders.”

Even across the linguistic barriers, there was 70% agreement among participants on where in the body emotions are felt.  With more complex emotions such as pride, shame, envy, depression, contempt, anxiety and love–the study’s participants did not draw somato-sensory maps with as much overlap. But they were still similar enough to beat chance.
 What’s Your Perspective on Emotional Displays Across Cultures?

Liars Are Honest?

Dice and Poker Chips

Courtesy of Stockvault

  Medical News Today (MNT) reports on how liars are truly honest at lying.

 Human Communication Research recently published a paper that many people are honest about their lying and most individuals tend to lie quite a lot.  527 people were surveyed in the project; reserachers Bruno Verschuere, Shaul Shalvi and Rony Halevy aksed them, ‘how often they had lied over the past 24 hours.’  41% of the participants indicated that they had not lied at all, which could quite possibly be a lie. It turned out that 5% of the individuals were accountable for 40% of all the lies told.

The researchers delved further by testing how honest the participants would be about the frequency of their lying.  Participants were asked to roll dice and received a sum of money depending on the number they reported having rolled. Because the researchers were unable to see the actual numbers rolled, participants were free to cheat and report higher numbers.

Participants who had already admitted to lying more frequently also had higher winnings in this dice test, indicating that participants, who said they lie often, did indeed lie often. Statistically, their scores were so implausible that they are likely to have lied about the numbers they rolled, rather than enjoying a series of lucky rolls.

“The fact that participants who indicated lying often actually did lie more often in the dice test demonstrates that they were honest about their dishonesty,“ said Verschuere. “It may be that frequent liars show more psychopathic traits; therefore have no trouble admitting to lying frequently.“

Previous studies found that, on average, survey participants admitted to lying twice a day. According to this study, this does not permit the conclusion that everyone lies because this is an average, it gives a distorted picture of individual differences in lying behavior.

It is important to note, however, that there were a whopping 41% who said that they did not lie at all…not even a white lie?

What do you think about these findings?

Scientific Evidence for the Efficacy of Training to Recognize Microexpressions of Emotions

MiX-Pro_finalBy Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyi Sung Hwang

There are numerous tests and ways to evaluate what we have learned.  However, there is currently no method to access the learning effect of reading other people’s emotions. Humintell is a leader of emotion reading training programs, and we have been conducting research in understanding emotions for years in order to not only create the best training tools and programs but also to accurately and reliably examine their impact.

 

Study 1:

Recently we published valuable evidence demonstrating the efficacy of training to recognize microexpressions of emotions (Matsumoto & Hwang, in press). This paper is notable because it presents the first scientific evidence of training efficacy to read microexpressions in normal adult populations. In Study 1, we randomly assigned subjects working as salespersons in South Korea to either a comparison group that received a general lecture of understanding emotions or a training group that received a 60-minute training session by an experienced trainer. The results showed a significantly increased ability of reading other’s emotions on the face in the training group compared to before the training and to the comparison group. This finding was especially notable for a couple of reasons. First, both groups were equivalent in their knowledge of emotions because they were both provided with basic information of reading emotions. However, while the training group received the actual training workshop, the comparison group received a book chapter about facial expressions of emotions instead. Second, the impact of the training program was not only demonstrated in the judgment tasks completed but also emerged in social and communication improvements evaluated on the job by third parties about the trainees two weeks after the participation in our program.

Study 2:

The findings of Study 1 were further bolstered by the results of Study 2, which showed the efficacy of the training program during a longer intermission period. In this study the trainees, who were attorneys or psychologists practicing as trial consultants, received our training. Two to three weeks later, a post-test was administered to the training group and a comparison group that did not receive the training. The training group had significantly higher recognition scores than did the comparison group. They also had faster reaction times. These findings were important because they demonstrated that not only can people be taught the ability to read emotions on face, but also that this ability can be retained.

The scientific data presented in these studies provide the necessary evidence for people who are interested in learning about understanding other’s emotions but hesitate to try it because of uncertainties about the outcome. If you interact with many people daily and want to understand them better, getting microexpression recognition training is an option that you may want to consider.

References

Matsumoto, D., & Hwang, H. S. (in press). Evidence for training the ability to read microexpressions of emotion. Motivation and Emotion. (Click here for a copy of the report. )