Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Emotion in an Artificial Intelligence World

It is an almost omnipresent fear these days that technology is degrading human connections, but could we leverage that same technology to foster closer emotional ties?

We already have enough trouble reading each other’s emotions, and this becomes even harder when we communicate over long-distances, whether through email, phone calls, or even video chat. We are not face to face and cannot develop that emotional recognition, as technology, distance, and distracting stimuli add up to interfere with our emotional connections.

Instead, many people compensate with uniform online expressions, like emojis or acronyms conveying laughter or sadness, such as the classic LOL (Laughing Out Loud). While these can make progress in expressing emotions, they cannot replace actual, in-person laughter and lack a great deal of emotional nuance. Moreover, the problem seems intractable, given that modern society forces us to communicate over great distances in order to stay in touch.

That’s where developers like True Emoji, Affectiva, and Brain Power come in. These companies are using a concept called Emotion AI which attempts to give computers and other forms of artificial intelligence the ability to recognize and understand human emotions. It was Affectiva that developed a form of Emotion AI, and this software has been used in fascinating ways to teach computers to recognize facial expressions and understand emotions.

True Emoji has used this to address the problem of online communication. They have developed an app that reads a user’s facial expression and develops corresponding personalized emojis. This allows users to select an emoji that fits with their own emotion, rather than relying on a clichéd list of preset icons.

As True Emoji CEO Sumesh Dugar points out “The Internet has created a huge divide between emotions and communications… How many times have you shown surprise just by sending an emoticon?”

Similarly, Brain Power has put this principle to use trying to teach autistic children how to better recognize emotions. While autistic children have trouble recognizing emotion, this does not mean that they lack empathy. As we discussed in a previous blog, this just means that they can benefit from being taught emotional recognition skills!

Brain Power’s work focuses on the creation of interactive games that respond to the emotions of the participants. Joey Salisbury, the Brain Power director of software development, describes these as “augmented reality games with the goal of creating new, engaging ways for families to play together and grow closer while learning about emotions.”

These are just two applications of this burgeoning field. By abandoning an age-old divide between technology and emotion, we can allow the two to build on each other, creating emotionally intelligent machines and using technology to foster social ties.

For more information on this subject, see our previous blogs here and here.

Our Emotional Eyes

People make a lot of fuss over the cliché that “eyes are the windows of the soul,” but emerging research indicates that this saying may be even more accurate than we think.

While emotions are displayed throughout all parts of our face, including the mouth and nostrils, a new study by Dr. Adam Anderson from Cornell University found that eyes are perhaps the most important indicators of our inner emotional states. Dr. Anderson connected these findings into a broader discussion over how our universal expressions evolved.

Questions concerning the origin of our facial expressions are as old as the theory of evolution itself. While Darwin is most famous for pioneering concepts of natural selection, he also initially proposed the notion that humans, across cultures, share a small set of universal emotions. He contended that the universality of these emotions was dependent on evolutionary factors, but subsequent generations of psychologists have struggled to back up these claims.

Eventually, as Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto writes, research has begun to confirm Darwin’s suspicions, finding over and over again that humans across the planet recognize some of the same emotions via the same expressions. These seven basic emotions include anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

While research has established the existence of these emotions, it remains to be seen how and why they evolved the way they did. It was this question that Dr. Anderson attempted to answer.

In his recent study, he and co-author Dr. Daniel H. Lee created digital images of the eyes while expressing six emotions (the basic emotions minus contempt) and asked participants to compare these models with a selection of potentially unrelated words signifying mental states, such as “discriminating, curious, bored, etc.”

Consistently, the participants were able to successfully match the words to their expression. This demonstrated a widespread ability to recognize emotions based on the eyes alone. Interestingly, the authors compared this performance with participants’ abilities to read emotional cues from other parts of the face and found that the eyes were a much better avenue to success.

While discussing his conclusions, Dr. Anderson explained “The eyes are windows to the soul likely because they are first conduits for sight. Emotional expressive changes around the eye influence how we see, and in turn, this communicates to others how we think and feel.”

In fact, there are some intuitive connections between the shape of the eye and the emotion expressed. For example, emotions related to disgust or contempt feature narrowed eyes, as though individuals are trying to block out negative images, while emotions like fear correlate with widened eyes, allowing us to better capture the details of a threatening environment.

These findings built on Dr. Anderson’s earlier 2013 research which found that facial expressions arose out of reactions to the outside environment, rather than having a primarily social function.

While this study helps reveal the evolutionary history of our emotional recognition, what are the practical implications? Certainly, these findings show that we need to focus on people’s eyes, but we will not benefit from the prompting of having relevant words attached.

In reality, this makes reading emotions much harder, though Humintell is focused on making this process easier, not only by promoting helpful information in this blog but through our top-quality professional training programs.

For more information on emotional recognition and basic emotions, check out our pages here and here!

Mirror Neurons: The Neurons that Shaped Civiliazation

Last week we posted a blog on mirror neurons and a growing body of psychological research that suggests that language is closely intertwined with our abilities to empathize with and understand other people.

In this Ted Talk, Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.