Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Infants Recognize Emotions

stockvault-abeera126849

Photo Courtesy of StockVault

A recent article by Popular Science  reports on a new study from Psychology professor Ross Flom and colleagues that found babies are able to read each other’s emotional expressions as early as 5 months old.  The study which was published in Infancy journal comes right after similar research  published by Flom on infants’ ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music .

Flom explains that while babies are unable to communicate through language they do learn how to communicate through affect, or emotion.  This implies that not only can they read emotional expressions of their infant peers, but they can perceive and associate changes in those expressions as well.  Flom points out, “… it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect.”   This change in affect is where babies are able to “read” each other while most adults are left scratching their heads.

The study, held at Brigham Young University which was co-authored by Professor Lorraine Bahrick  and  graduate student Mariana Vaillant-Molina from Florida International University, looked at 40 babies ranging from 3.5 to 5 months old.

The study placed baby participants in front of two monitors.  One displayed a video of a happy baby and the other displayed a video of an unhappy baby.  While the babies were placed in front of the monitors, researchers played audio from a third baby.  The audio was either of a happy, laughing baby or of a sad, crying baby.

Researchers noticed that when the audio reflected happy baby noises the infants focused on the happy baby video and when the audio was sad they looked more to the sad video.

Past studies found that babies (not infants) are able to perceive facial expressions of emotion in familiar adults at 6 months and all other adults by 7 months.  However, this study takes it a step further documenting that infants as young as 5 months (but not as young as 3.5 months) have the capability to perceive and recognize emotional expressions in other infants

Flom substantiates, “These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion.” Flom goes on to say, “Babies learn more in their first 2 1/2 years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things.”

Flom would like to take his recent findings a step further by testing whether infants younger than 5 months are able to demonstrate this same level of perception by watching and hearing clips of themselves.

What do you think? Will babies be able to read emotion even earlier if it’s their own?

Facial Cues that Do & Don’t Indicate Lying

stockvault-homeless-mind039s-eyes100545

Courtesy of StockVault

4GWAR, the nations counter terrorism, homeland security and  new technologies blog recently did an article on Humintell’s Director, Dr. David Matsumoto and his speech at a Human Geography Conference outside of Washington D.C.

The article’s focus was on the “geography” of  the human and that role in deception detection.  Human geography is a multi-discipline study of not only the physical nature of the earth but the people who live on it and how they relate among themselves and with others along political, economic, cultural, linguistic, geographic lines.

Dr. Matsumoto pointed out in this conference as well as many times before that there are literally hundreds of studies that indicate the average individual (and sometimes even the improperly trained expert) can only detect real deception about 50% of the time.

“Bottom line: we’re no better [at it] than flipping a coin,” Matsumoto said.  One good way to delve into a more in depth conversation with a witness or suspect is to ask the same types of questions in varying ways (referring to the event in question) and closely watch their facial expressions, more specifically their microexpressions.

This is very tricky and can take, even the expert, years to become proficient in such techniques.  However, these microexpressions are only indicators that there could be more to the story than is being revealed not that there is concrete evidence of deception.

For instance, if your interrogating someone and say, “Were you at the victims house the night of the murder?” and they display a microexpression of fear followed by disgust, then there is probably more to the story then they are verbally revealing and that, that particular line of questioning should be explored more.

“There is no such thing as a Pinocchio response,” Matsumoto, founder and director of the Culture and Emotion Research Laboratory at San Francisco State, stated, “There’s no set of behaviors that reliably differentiate between who’s telling the truth and who isn’t.“

Typical Deception Myths to Avoid:

1.  Liars avoid eye contact.

2. Deceivers look up and to the left or the right when they are telling a lie.

3.  Liars scratch their nose often.

In a similar article on deception and new technologies, Biometric Update.com reveals the new wave in understanding a person’s emotional state.

Emotient, which specializes in facial expression analysis, and iMotions, an eye-tracking and biometric software platform company, have announced that Procter and Gamble, The United States Air Force and Yale University are its first customers for a newly integrated platform that combines facial expressions recognition and analysis, eye-tracking, EEG and GSR technologies.

This new technology is being designed for a variety of fields such as gaming, scientific, academic and marketing research.

Add to the deception myths or just point out what you think is most important in deception detection!

Conscious Laughter

stockvault-joyful-woman114909

Photo @Stockvault.net

How does YOUR brain register laughter ?

It’s important to note, not all laughter is perceived as good.  There is mocking laughter, ticklish laughter, which can be good or bad and joyful laughter.  So, how do we know which is which without a visual context?

Researchers recently delved into this question and came to find that the complex processes of the brain can and do in fact delineate between different types of laughter.

The Times: Health & Family reported on research led by Dirk Wildgruber, professor of neuropsychiatry at Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen in Germany, which explored what these different expressions of hilarity looked like in the brain.

Wildgruber and colleagues had participants listen to laugh tracks while concurrently scanning their brain.  The laugh tracks were generated by professional actors, who were given three specific scenarios — being tickled, feeling joy and taunting someone — and asked to produce the appropriate laugh for those situations.

Participants were asked to categorize this laughter as joyful, mocking or tickling.

An interesting fact is that the researchers did not find any distinction in terms of blood flow to specific brain regions — which is how scientists generally measure whether an area of the brain is activated — between joyous and taunting laughter.

However they did see changes in the strength of the connections between regions.  When participants listened to taunting laughter, for example, the data showed a stronger connection between auditory areas and those involved in analyzing other people’s intentions, which is known technically as “mentalizing.” But during joyous laughter, the visual areas were more highly connected with the mentalizing regions. “

It might be worth noting that the participants were able to correctly identify the laughs in the majority of cases, though they were slightly less accurate at correctly labeling tickling.

“The stronger connection between the ‘voice area’ and the ‘mentalizing area’ during perception of taunting laughter might indicate that the social consequences of this signal are primarily inferred from the acoustic signal,” says Wildgruber

For more information read the entire article