Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Studying Facial Expressions in High School

Colby Howell and Varun Ramesh, two Hamilton High school students, won paid trips to Los Angeles to compete for $4 million in prizes and scholorships at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair , for their scientific research projects.

These students were among the grand prize winners last week in the Arizona Science and Engineering Fair. The statewide competition is sponsored by the Arizona Technology Council Foundation.

According to azcentral.com, Varun focused his research on developing a computer device that could detect facial expressions and gestures of  individuals talking to someone with a visual impairment.

15 year old Varun and his research partner Shantanu Bala, a student at Barry Goldwater High, wanted to develop a “dyadic interaction assistant for tracking head gestures and facial expressions.”

In their research, they used a camera aimed at the person listening to someone speak who has a visual impairment. The listener’s facial expressions were recorded and fed back to a glove with sensors worn by the person with the impairment.  That person could almost always understand the facial expressions of the listener.

Varun stated, “It’s sort of like emoticons.”

The students are developing a new prototype for the Intel ISEF.  “We found we could get 95 percent accuracy,” Varun said, which is better than their predicted 90% accuracy.

The Efficacy of Training to Recognize Microexpression of Emotion

A new study performed by Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyi Sung Hwang demonstrated that the ability to read microexpressions, facial expressions of emotion that can appear on the face as fast as 1/2 second,  can be trained.

They present two studies that prove this claim as well as evidence for the retention of the training effects.  Their study is the first scientific evidence of training efficacy to read microexpressions in normal adult populations.

These findings are important because they demonstrate that not only can people be taught the ability to read emotions on the face, but also that this ability can be retained.

See the full paper and the research for both studies here.

Blushing: A Free Pass?

Charles Darwin described a blush as “the most peculiar and most human of all expressions” and noted that it is a reaction we have no control over.

A recent study has suggested that besides the redness of your cheeks, blushing can have some unexpected benefits.

MSNBC.Com purports that a study claims that blushing after making a public mistake make others think that you more trustworthy than someone who showed no emotion towards their public faux pas.

The study’s findings , published in the journal Emotion stated that participants, in a prisoners dilemma game, judged the defector (of the research game) less harshly when she blushed and thought she was less likely to defect again.  They even gave the blushing, neutral faced opponent more money during this trust task.

Corine Dijk, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the study’s lead author, says, “After you do something wrong, people like you more when you blush.”  Dijk goes on to state, “[blushing] signals that you care about others opinions.”

What do you think about the study’s findings?  Do you think blushing should be a free pass for a mistake, or that it makes a person more likable?