Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Imitating Facial Expressions

The Ventura County Star has reported that people who get Botox often have trouble relating their emotions, which could prove a detriment to others.

Why would this affect others?  Well, according to David Neal of USC’s Dornsife College, people read each other’s emotions in part by imitating them.

Neal’s study suggests that in a sub-conscious process called micro-mimicry people mimic the emotions of others.  Botox complicates this process by smoothing out wrinkles and immobilizing muscles.

He purports, “This would happen in about a third of a second”, “My own body is telling me what that (look of) suspicion is – suspicion or maybe seduction.”

The study’s findings are published in the journal, Social Psychological and Personality Science.

According to the research, people were shown various photographs and asked to identify the emotion being shown.  The people receiving Botox picked out the right emotion about 70% of the time, which was about 7% less than people on the dermal filler (i.e. the control).

“It would mean that for every 15th person you would encounter, having Botox means you would make one more error in working out what emotion that person was feeling,” Neal went on to say.

Plastic surgeon, Dr. Laurie McCall, said that the study’s impact is likely to be pretty modest.  She cited a 2006 study that shown Botox to be a possible key ingredient in diminishing depression.  She suggest that anger lines and the reactions triggered from others may affect the way people feel, “For Lots of patients, they’re not coming in to look more beautiful or younger, they’re trying to find a way to look less stressed or angry.”

Youth Are Our Best Liars

Young people are better liars than old people?  That is exactly what Science Alert is reporting.

A New Zealand study at the University of Otago has found that older people find it harder to lie more convincingly than younger people.  What’s more is that not only do they have trouble lying but find it difficult to detect when others are lying.

The researchers believe that the latter is due to age-related decline in emotion recognition.  The ability to lie uses certain parts of the brain that are connected to memory and planning ability, which for most naturally declines with age.

An interesting fact, according to associate professor Jamin Halberstadt is that both young and older listeners found it easier to differentiate truths and lies when the speaker was an older adult.

Previous research recognized that micro-expressions play a key role in detecting lies.  Halberstadt expounds upon this, “Emotion recognition also involves auditory and body-language aspects, so the giveaway signals might additionally or instead, be heard in the voice or seen in emotions expressed through the body.  We still don’t know what exactly allows listeners to correctly detect lies, although we know that people can differentiate lies and truth at a rate above chance level – though they are far from perfect.”

English.news.cn also reported that this research could help explain why older people might be more susceptible to con artists and scams than younger people.

They also went on to state that Janice Murray a member of the research team presented the findings at the Association of Psychological Science’s convention in Washington, D.C.   The team’s findings are also being published in the US journal Psychology and Aging.

Crying Without Tears

What if you couldn’t cry?  Or what if you couldn’t recognize your own face when you were sad and wanted your tears to flow?

There are people who do not have the ability to cry and that can have a huge affect on their mental well-being.

Scientists think that people with Sjogren’s syndrome, who do not have the ability to shed tears also might experience difficulty in expressing  their emotions leaving them to rely on their facial expressions and words to let people know how they feel.

EurekAlert reported that a Dutch study, which assessed 300 people showed that patients with Sjogren’s syndrome were labeled clinically “alexithymic”.   This means that they have difficulty identifying and describing emotions.  These patients were compared to the control group where only 12% of the healthy controls had difficulty identifying emotions.

A very interesting fact that the study revealed was that higher levels of alexithymia were moderately correlated with worse mental well-being in both groups.