An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields
Most people can probably sympathize with the uncomfortable encounter with someone you think you know but aren’t quite sure if you do yet they look so familiar or perhaps you can’t quite place their face to a name and are secretly hoping someone will ask first?
The brain’s capacity to find and recognize faces is vast. Is your brain in tip top shape?
Take a look at this short and interesting video on our brain and how and why we recognize faces. Thanks to 1000searches for the video!
In the past many studies have been conducted on children with autism and social disorders such as bipolar disorder and mood dysregulation. It has been well documented that children with these disorders have problems identifying facial expressions of emotion but little has been know of why.
New research has discovered why children with these social disorders have difficulty in recognizing and processing facial expressions of emotions such as anger, sadness and happiness. The findings were recently revealed at the Society for Neuroscience; and, according to the examiner.com and US News Health, they suggest that it is the lack of eye contact that triggers children’s inability to correctly recognize faces and facial expressions.
Pilyoung Kim from the National Institute of Mental Health found that children with social disorders such as bipolar focus more on the nose and mouth region of a person’s face rather than the eyes, which is the focus of their healthy counterparts. Kim suggests that treatment programs that get children to focus on the eyes to identify emotions would be most beneficial.
In a previous blog “Virtual Emotions and Autism“, we reported that new technology was being developed via video games to help children with social disorders such as these to recognize facial expressions of emotion. The ability to recognize or not recognize facial expressions of emotion affects a person’s ability to interact socially to the world around them.
“If such training helps children to process the emotional information in the world more accurately, that may in turn increase their ability to regulate their emotional reactions to social situations,” purports Kim.
Do you ever wonder why it is so hard to tell the truth all of the time? Why is it that we are deceptive beings?
Well, Salon.com has reported on the mechanics of deceit, the evolutionary science of deceit and how the two areas overlap.
The article focuses on Robert Trivers a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
Via a phone interview Trivers reveals how to define deception and how it works. When asked the question, “When you talk about deceit and self-deception what exactly are you talking about?” Trivers responded, “Well, in verbal terms it would be lying to others and lying to yourself. But deception is much deeper because it doesn’t require language and it’s found in a whole series of other animals.
His book, The Folly of Fools reveals more than just information on typical deception. Some of the topics covered include animal predation and people’s sex lives.
To see the rest of Triver’s interview click here.