Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects

Have you ever heard of face pareidolia? This everyday phenomenon where people see faces in everyday objects is a human condition that relates to how our brains are wired. Once considered a symptom of psychosis, it arises from an error in visual perception.

According to new research led by David Alais of the University of Sydney, our brains detect and respond emotionally to these illusory faces the same way they do to real human faces.

In his paper entitled “A shared mechanism for facial expression in human faces and face pareidolia” Alais and his colleagues suggest that human brains are evolutionarily hardwired to recognize faces, with highly specialized brain regions for facial detection and processing.

The Study

According to ScienceAlert, Alais and his colleagues asked 17 volunteers to look at a series of dozens of illusory and human faces, repeated several times over, then rate the strength of emotion in each one through the same computer software.

Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects: sample faces pareidolia study
Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects

The researchers found that the study participants mostly agreed on the expressions that the pareidolia faces were showing, and that bias crept in based on the expression of the previous face – something that we do with human faces too. This also happened when real and illusory faces were mixed up.

In other words, a succession of happy faces makes us more likely to see the next one as happy as well. That this bias was observed in both real and illusory faces suggests the brain is processing them in a similar way, and using similar neural networks.

Facial Perception

Facial perception involves more than just the features common to all human faces, like the placement of the mouth, nose, and eyes. Our brains might be evolutionarily attuned to those universal patterns, but reading social information requires being able to determine if someone is happy, angry, or sad or whether they are paying attention to us.

“What we found was that actually these pareidolia images are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face,” Alais said. “You are somehow unable to totally turn off that face response and emotion response and see it as an object. It remains simultaneously an object and a face.”

Long Term Implications

Alais has been interested in this and related topics for years. For instance, in a 2016 paper published in Scientific Reports, Alais and his colleagues built on prior research involving rapid sequences of faces that demonstrated that perception of face identity, as well as attractiveness, is biased toward recently seen faces.

They designed a binary task that mimicked the selection interface in online dating websites and apps (like Tinder), in which users swipe left or right in response to whether they deem the profile pictures of potential partners attractive or unattractive. Alais et al. found that many stimulus attributes—including orientation, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness of the online dating profiles—are systematically biased toward recent past experience.

This previous study as well as the most recent one conducted may help to inform research in artificial intelligence or disorders of facial processing such as prosopagnosia.

The post Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects first appeared on Humintell.

Puppies Read Body Language

Puppies read body language Recent research out of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center suggests that “man’s best friend” are born ready to read body language and are capable of communicating and interacting with humans at a very young age with no formal training required.

Domestic dogs are born to socialize with humans because we bred them that way; the human-dog relationship goes back between 14,000–30,000 years ago and dogs have evolved alongside us. In fact, research even suggests that good are dogs at reading their owners’ emotions.

In this newest study study called “Early-emerging and highly heritable sensitivity to human communication in dogs” published in Current Biology found that two-month-old puppies can recognize when people are pointing at objects and will gaze at our faces when they’re spoken to – suggesting that dogs have an innate capacity to interact with us through body language.

Although individual relationships with people might influence that behavior, at least 40% of this ability comes from genetics alone, says lead researcher Emily Bray.

“These are quite high numbers, much the same as estimates of the heritability of intelligence in our own species. All these findings suggest that dogs are biologically prepared for communication with humans.”

The Study

Bray and colleagues have been working with Canine Companions, the largest United States service dog organization for people with physical disabilities, for over a decade, conducting research on how dogs think and solve problems.

For her latest study, Bray and colleagues studied 375 golden retriever and labrador trainee service puppies. At eight weeks old they are just old enough to be motivated by treats. Bray and colleagues put the puppies through three tests for human-dog communication:

To understand whether the pups’ early ability could be explained by their biology, all of them were of known heritage with a similar rearing history and pedigree, which helped build a statistical model assessing genetic versus environmental factors.

1) Classic Pointing Experiment

The researchers placed the young dogs between two overturned cups—one containing a treat—and pointing to the one with the treat. The animals understood the nonverbal gesture more than two-thirds of the time, approaching the performance of adult dogs. But they didn’t get any better over a dozen rounds, suggesting they were not learning the behavior.

2) Puppy Talk

In a second experiment, a researcher stood outside a large playpen and, for 30 seconds, engaged in the kind of high-pitched “puppy talk” familiar to almost anyone who has owned a dog: “Hey puppy, look at you! You’re such a good puppy.”

The animals spent an average of 6 seconds staring at the person. Such eye contact is rare among mammals and it’s an important foundation for social interaction with people.

3) Finding Food

In a final test, the researchers taught the puppies to find food in a plastic container, then sealed it with a lid. In contrast to adult dogs, which usually give up after a few seconds and look to humans for assistance, the pups rarely gazed at their scientist companions for help.

This suggested to the researchers that puppies seem to be sensitive to receiving information from humans and that they may not yet know that they can solicit help.

The Findings

This fascinating study suggests that from a young age, dogs display human-like social skills, which have a strong genetic component, meaning these abilities have strong potential to undergo selection.

Bray suggests that their findings might therefore point to an important piece of the domestication story, in that animals with a propensity for communication with our own species might have been selected for in the wolf populations that gave rise to dogs.

The post Puppies Read Body Language first appeared on Humintell.

What Triggers Emotions in Humans?

What Triggers Emotions in Humans?What are some examples of things that trigger emotions? Getting stuck in traffic? Being hungry? Watching the news? How your partner squeezes the tube of toothpaste (yes, this is one of my pet peeves!)?

Most emotion scientists believe that emotions are triggered by how we evaluate events.

These events include not only what happens around us, but also thoughts and feelings in our heads, because those thoughts and feelings can themselves trigger emotions.

Appraisal Theories of Emotion

This evaluation process is known as appraisal, and over the decades there have been tons of research that have led to many different appraisal theories of emotion. Although there are differences among them, these theories generally state that there are different emotions are triggered (or elicited) by different ways we appraise or evaluate events, and that different emotions are triggered by different appraisals.

Cross-cultural research on emotion has contributed a wealth of information about many domains of emotion.

In my last blog on understanding anger, we discussed about how that body of research has informed us about what is known about emotion antecedents and appraisals.

Learn tips and techniques on how to better manage your emotions!

Join us for our LIVE webinar on March 25, 2021! More info here.

What are Antecedents?

Stomach, Health, Diet, Dessert, Eating, Belly, Sugar

Antecedents are the specific events that people identify to trigger emotions.

Those include things like what are at the top of this blog – getting stuck in traffic, being hungry, watching the news, or the toothpaste fiasco. But as mentioned just above, antecedents can also include thoughts about the future, memories about the past, and even one’s current emotions.

Universal, Psychological Themes

Research has demonstrated that, despite many differences (and similarities) in the specific types of events that trigger emotions in us, there are universal, psychological themes associated with each of the seven universal emotions – anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

A psychological theme is the basic, most elemental way in which our minds process and evaluate any event in terms of what the event means to us psychologically. These themes are mostly concerned with our welfare.

The fact that there are universal, psychological themes associated with basic emotions means that the same underlying, psychological themes trigger the same emotion in all humans around the world, regardless of differences in race, culture, nationality and any other demographic characteristic.

In that last blog (hopefully it was helpful for some to deal with their anger episodes), we learned that the universal, psychological theme that triggers anger all around the world is goal obstruction. That is, regardless of whatever the specific event is, if the event is appraised or evaluated in our minds as “goal obstruction,” that appraisal would trigger the emotion of anger.

In the same way, each of the other basic emotions are associated with a universal, psychological theme that triggers it all around the world.

 

Quick Descriptions of Themes for the Other Basic Emotions

Contempt – Moral Superiority

Contempt is the emotion that is elicited when our minds appraise something or someone as beneath us.

 

Disgust – Contamination

Disgust is triggered when our minds appraise something that is dirty, rotten, offensive, or contaminated.

Read how anger, contempt and disgust fuel hostility

Fear – Threat

Fear is triggered when our minds appraise something as threatening, or potentially threatening, or sense of self. The sense of self that is threatened can be our physical self as well as our psychological self.

Happiness – Goal Attainment

Achieving our goals triggers happiness (which makes happiness sort of the opposite of anger, not sadness).

Sadness – Loss

Loss of a loved object or other person elicits sadness.

Did you know? Children as old as 12 have difficulty telling the difference between genuine and fake sadness from facial expressions. Read more here.

Surprise – Novel Objects

Surprise is triggered when something is new. Interesting, surprise tends to be the briefest emotion because things are not new to us for very long.

Where do emotion appraisals come from?

I believe that they are part of our innate emotion system, which we have inherited as part of our evolutionary history.

Having this system and this set of appraisals and psychological themes was helpful in that evolutionary past to ward off threats, fight for food, obtain and keep mates, build families and communities – basically to survive.

Moreover, they helped us humans to survive in many situations that required an immediate response or action. Emotions and the appraisal system helped us respond in those situations with minimal conscious awareness.

For example, what do you think would happen if you started drinking spoiled milk and had to think through the risk-benefit ratio of doing so once you perceived the nasty taste?

By the time you thought that through, you would have ingested that spoiled milk and it would be in your system, along with all the other contaminants in there, which would obviously make you sick and/or even bring about death. That wouldn’t be good for survival!

Thank god we don’t go through such time consuming, risk-benefit calculations for many events that have implications for our health or safety. Those with that system survived and remain here today; those without that system were selected out of existence by nature.

The appraisal process is fast! Extremely fast!

And for good reason. It is so fast that scientists still don’t have an accurate accounting of exactly how fast it is (although we have good guesses!). Thus, changing the appraisal process is very, very difficult.

In actuality, we’re all constantly scanning our environment for possible emotion triggers. Much of time, we appraise events and they don’t trigger an emotion; that is, they are not evaluated as possibly requiring an immediate response from us in order to survive. In fact, some may say that our contemporary human life is pretty cushy, where emotions hamper more than they help.

But when something happens that may require an immediate response, the emotion system kicks in, appraising events and other stimuli extremely rapidly and turning on the emotion system in order to act. Just think about a time that you may have been on a sidewalk and abruptly heard a car or bus coming at you.

What about culture and emotion?

Now, although the underlying psychological themes associated with each of the basic emotions are universal and innate, culture still plays an important role in how we adapt our emotion system for daily use.

Yes, there are some events that universally trigger the same kinds of emotions – spoiled milk, snakes, feces, etc. – all kinds of things that are associated with survival regardless of culture.

But cultures also facilitate our learning to associate our innate emotion systems in culture-specific and individually different ways. That’s why the same event can trigger very different emotions in different people – because they have learned to associate different appraisals for those events in their upbringing.

So the next time you think about an emotion, think about not only the specific event that you think triggered it, but the underlying, psychological theme with which your mind evaluated that event.

That’s the real trigger of the emotion.

The post What Triggers Emotions in Humans? first appeared on Humintell.