Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Positive Emotions and Asians

If you think happy thoughts then you will eventually become happier.  Is this true? 

Much research has shown that what a person portrays as reality can become their reality.  If you smile even when you’re sad you will become less sad.  Does this always work? 

According to a new study, posted on EurekAlert , performed by psychologists at the University of Washington, this might be true for many European Americans but is found lacking for the Asian American population.  

This study  published in the online journal Emotion , showed that for Asian Americans there was no correlation between positive emotions and less stress or depression as was shown for their European-American counter parts.

The study’s findings reveal that Asians interpret and react to positive emotions differently in regards to their mental health.  This is significant considering that Asian make up 60% of the world population.

For example, upon winning an award the typical Asian response would be “I’m so happy I’m afraid.”  Their achievement would trigger feelings of happiness for the achievement combined with concern that others would be jealous. 

The researchers suggest that the blending of emotions is common among Asians and may be contributed to by Buddhist beliefs and yin-yang attitudes, that happiness either leads to suffering or is impossible to obtain and that life is a natural balance of good and bad.

Janxin Leu, UW assistant professor of psychology purports, mindfulness therapies that encourage patients to pay attention to the good and bad will likely work better and [patients should] “observe when they feel good and bad and notice that both will disappear.  Everything passes.”

This analysis suggests that although humans share seven universal facial expressions of emotion (fear, sadness, anger, contempt, surprise, joy and disgust) across cultures our internalization of these emotions is divergent because of cultural differences and traditions.

Compassionate Doctors are Healers!

Time Healthland.com , suggests that if doctors want to be successful, measured in terms of healthier patients, then they need to empathize more with their patients.

We all know the idiom “You reap what you sow!!” right?   If this is true, then why wouldn’t it pertain to the medical profession as well?  If you are kind to your patients, then they shall be kind to you and perhaps more willing to heed your advice.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Academic Medicine, better bedside manners along with more empathy for a patient’s ailments, led to better doctoring or at least better patient results.

Mohammadreza Hojat and his team of researchers of Jefferson Medical College, studied 891 patients treated for diabetes by 29 different doctors for 3 years.   Doctors were scored based on how much they understood their patient’s perspective and how much that understanding fueled their desire to cure the patient.

Empathetic doctor’s patients were 16% more likely to have control over their blood sugar and 15% more likely to have better cholesterol levels than patients of physicians with the lowest empathy scores.

So the old adage “kill them with kindness” really does work (even on diseases).  What do you think?  Is a physician’s empathy level really helping a patient heal?

Prior research purports that patients of highly empathetic doctors are more likely to follow their treatment plans, which could account for these differences.

I Cannot Spot a Lie

What does it say about a person if they cannot tell if someone is being sarcastic or lying?

Katherine Rankin, Ph.D., a member of the UCSF’s Memory and Aging Center and senior author of a recent study, suggests that it may be possible to spot people with particular neurodegenerative diseases early by looking for the telltale sign of their inability to detect lies.

UCSF’s website states that the ability to detect lies resides in the brain’s frontal lobe.  In diseases like frontotemporal dementia, an area that progressively degenerates because of the accumulation of damaged proteins, the frontal lobe plays an important part in complex, higher-order human behaviors.

Would the inability to detect sarcasm and lies actually match the brain regions hit early in these diseases?

The UCSF researchers focused on the fact that people with frontotemporal dementia often lose the ability to detect sarcasm and lies compared to a person who has Alzheimer’s .  The article goes on to purport that doctors have observed evidence of this for years.  People suffering from this disease sometimes lose significant amounts of money to online scams and telemarketers because of their blind trust.

175 seniors participated in this study and more than half had a neurodegenerative disease.  They were shown a video of two people conversing.  In the video one of the conversers would occasionally lie or use sarcasm, which was prevalent both in verbal and nonverbal cues.  The participants were then asked yes or no questions about the video. Patients with frontal dementia were unable to discern between sincere and insincere speech.  An interesting fact is that patients with Alzheimer’s disease fared much better.

News Medical also commented on this new research.  They state that frontotemporal dementia makes up about 5% of patients with dementia and tends to occur at a younger age (40-70) then say Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for nearly 80% of such patients.

“If somebody has strange behavior and they stop understanding things like sarcasm and lies, they should see a specialist who can make sure this is not the start of one of these diseases,” said Rankin.