Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

TELL Me How you Feel

According to NewsWise and the American Institute of Physics a research team at the University of Florida, Gainesville is expanding lie detection  capabilities and moving away from the old way of the polygraph, which was not always reliable, to the updated way of voice stress analysis.

The researchers confirmed that the human voice does in fact change in systematic ways under carefully measured stress tests.  Their findings, “Talker and gender effects in induced, simulated, and perceived stress in speech,”  will be presented Wednesday morning, Nov. 2.

“The results were a surprise. We had expected that higher stressors would prompt both increased physiological response and increased self-reported stress levels in all test subjects fairly uniformly for both men and women,” Dr. Harnsberge, a speech scientist in the Department of Linguistics, explains.  However, the research revealed hat men and women respond quite differently to the same stressors.

This type of research holds promise for the future by improving speech analysis systems such as lie detectors and computerized voice recognition.

Desperate Housewives

The topic of microexpressions have made it onto another hit t.v. show.  ABC’s  Desperate Housewives, which airs on Sundays 9/8 central has a great scene between Chuck and Bree about lying, deception and their telltale signs.

Bree’s former lover and officer of the law, Chuck surprises her as she arrives home.  He asks her a simple question , “Have you seen this man? as he holds up a picture of a guy, “Two months ago the night of that dinner party.  We were walking to your house and we passed him.  Right in front of your house, remember?”

Bree’s response is, ” I’ve never seen that man before in my life.” But for Chuck her facial expressions or microexpressions tell another story and their confrontation heats up. “Microexpressions flash across a persons face for a fraction of a second covering their true emotions, that’s how cops know when people lie,” Chuck retorts.

What do you think?  Is there more to Bree’s story than meets the eye?

Language and Emotions

Researchers at the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology have set out to answer the question, does our understanding of emotions depend on the language we speak, or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture?

ScienceDaily reports on Understanding Emotions without Language. This new study, which suggests that emotions evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms, compared speakers of German to speakers of Yucatec  Maya, which has only one word for the emotions of disgust and anger.

“Earlier research has found that people who have different words for two emotions do better on this task when the dominant emotion in the two photographs is different, like when one is mainly angry and the other one is mainly disgusted,” explains Disa Sauter. “But is this because they internally label the faces angry and disgusted, or is it because emotions are processed by basic human mechanisms that have categories like anger and disgust regardless of whether we have words for those feelings?”

The studies results were published in Emotion a journal of the APA.  “Our results show that understanding emotional signals is not based on the words you have in your language to describe emotions,” Sauter says. “Instead, our findings support the view that emotions have evolved as a set of basic human mechanisms…”