Social Engineering Blogs

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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.

Universal or Just Deceptive Emotions?

We spend a fair amount of this blog discussing the role of universal emotional expressions, but not everyone agrees.

Some emerging research, such as a recent study by Drs. Carlos Crivelli and Alan Fridlund, has begun to challenge some fundamental ideas related to the concept of basic emotions. This research questions whether facial expressions reflect emotions at all but instead reflect intentional social action.

For example, Dr. Crivelli has spent months interacting with indigenous groups like the Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea and the Mwani of Mozambique. When many of these people are shown basic emotion expressions, Dr. Crivelli found that they declined to identify those expressions with emotions.

Instead, a smile was described as “laughing” or as a feeling of being in “raptured enchantment.” Dr. Crivelli noticed that these referred not to emotions as much as to behaviors and actions. He found similar results when replicating these analyses among the Himba people of Namibia or the Hadza in Tanzania.

Moreover, a 2017 meta-analysis found that often facial expressions are not representing the emotion we would thing they should be, based on basic emotion theory. Instead, co-author Dr. Rainer Reisenzein suggested that openly expressing one’s emotions could “[put] us at a disadvantage” in an evolutionary sense.

Dr. Fridlund emphasized a similar point, stressing that emotions have strategic social motivations. Perhaps individuals are not revealing inner states but are trying to convey a specific state to you, so that you will act accordingly.

While many would see this research as a challenge to the idea of basic emotions, this isn’t really the case. Instead, it just underscores the importance of both incorporating microexpression analysis and deception detection. Microexpressions are actually just basic emotional expressions that are displayed almost instantaneously.

These microexpressions are the key to seeing through the sort of deceptive expressions that the aforementioned studies discuss. Certainly, your peer may be using a facial expression in a way that doesn’t just display the emotion in question, but their emotion is not completely concealed. It comes out in the form of a microexpression.

Still, this new cultural research helps elaborate on two complexities. First, many researchers may take for granted that the presence of expressions as showing underlying emotions. Such perceptions must take into account the possibility that others’ expressions are being used instrumentally.

Second, we must revisit the perennial issue of how to contextualize basic emotions into the admittedly distinctive manifestations that we see across cultures. Instead of speaking in terms of underlying emotions, some indigenous groups can simply describe the behaviors. What does this say about deception in those cultures? About emotional openness?

These are even more reasons to see what Humintell can do to better let you read microexpressions and to allow us to incorporate cultural differences into our people reading.