Social Engineering Blogs

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Threat in the Golden Years

As we age, we tend to look more fondly on the world and on our memories, but does that mean we can’t detect threat?

While a great deal of research indicates that older individuals tend to focus on pleasurable or non-threatening aspects of experience and memories, it is unclear whether this means they are less able to recognize threating behaviors in other individuals. This is what Drs. Mara Mather and Marisa Knight sought to determine in a 2006 article.

This question tries to get at even deeper questions as to how the brain processes threatening information. Because our threat detection is mediated by the brain’s amygdala, perhaps this functions less effectively as we age. Alternatively, this may be due to “strategic processing” where older individuals’ brains use positive inclinations to better process information.

In order to critically evaluate this question, both young and older participants were recruited for an experimental study, asking preliminary questions to confirm that the older participants did tend to experience a more positive affect. Each participant was then exposed to a selection of nine facial images.

Half of the participants were only shown neutral faces, while another half had one emotional expression mixed into these neutral faces. Some of these treatment faces were threatening, but others were sad or friendly. After being exposed to the treatment, each individual was asked to identify whether the face appeared to be threatening.

Contrary to some of the theoretical expectations, age seemed to make no impact on accurate identification. They were also able to recognize threatening faces more quickly, confirming previous research, but age did not seem to make a difference here.

So, what does this tell us about our ability to detect threat? And more specifically, how does this help us do so?

First, it tells us that threat detection is a very fundamental underlying process in our brains. While a great deal of cognitive processes change as we age, it is notable that this one does not seem to.

Second, the almost instantaneous nature of threat detection not only underscores its fundamental role but also gives us practical tips on how to detect threat. Just like facial recognition, our brain automatically processes faces and gives us certain intuitions.

However, while it is good to trust these intuitions, they might not always be accurate. Our brains are pretty incredible, but they are not infallible. This is a great reason to get real, professional training to teach our brain what to look for. This can make an already incredible skill even more formidable!

Domestic Violence Awareness Month

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and while this topic may be an uncomfortable one, understanding domestic violence and how to detect and prevent it can save lives.

One way of achieving this is to better train law enforcement to identify signs of aggression and violence. This involves significant people reading and emotional detection skills, as we seek to learn what microexpressions betray that feeling of aggression. As Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang found, aggression is predicted by fleeting and unconscious but also very telling facial expressions.

This research, published in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management in 2014 relied on a series of four studies which consistently found that observers with training in law enforcement tended to reliably identify the facial signs that predict aggression and violence.

However, those without much experience witnessing or experiencing physical assaults did not tend to do well in selecting the expression that predicted violence. Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang attributed this to the reliance on stereotypical presentations of aggressive expressions, which tended to be incorrect.

Their studies also help map out exactly what the expression in question looks like, but this also grapples with the differences between types of aggression: premeditated and spontaneous.

For instance, the face of someone considering a premeditated assault is characterized by lowered brows, raised eyelids, and the tightening of lips. This appears as though they are seeking to control their expression of anger, evincing determination and concentration.

Such an expression must be contrasted with the “loss of control face,” which is seen in those who are about to attack after having just lost their temper. This expression also shows lowered brows and raised eyelids, but now the eyelids are even more starkly raised, creating a bulging, staring quality. Again, the lips are tightened, but the lower lip is not raised. The raising of the lower lip is often associated with efforts to control one’s emotions which is not present in this form of aggression.

So, how is this information helpful? And how does it relate to Domestic Violence Awareness?

Well, there are a couple lessons to draw from here. First, we have the potential to detect when someone is going to commit acts of aggression. Learning how to do this is important both for detecting when someone will attack us but also if someone is struggling to refrain from or is planning to attack others.

Second, without training, many of us are very bad at realizing this potential. While law enforcement officers were shown to be quite good at it across cultures, laypeople stand to gain a lot from a formal training procedure.

If nothing else, we hope that focusing on this potential can also help us become more aware of signs of aggression around us, for our benefit and for that of others.

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Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.