Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Dr. David Matsumoto – NPR Interview

NPR’s ScienceFriday  has just released  their interview with Dr. David Matsumoto, Humintell’s Director, San Francisco State University psychology professor and microexpressions expert.

Dr. Matsumoto has been doing extensive research in the fields of Evaluating Truthfulness, Detecting Deception, Microexpressions (fleeting flashes of emotion that appear when someone is trying to conceal information) and Culture for many years.

He has worked with various government agencies and has contirbuted to numeous publications including the FBI Law Enforcement  Bulletin “Evaluating Truthfulness & Detecting Deception” and has been featured in various articles such as the New York Times’, Proud is Proud, Sighted or not, Reserachers Find.

During this interview Dr. Matsumoto points out that microexpressions are subtle cues that may reveal how an interview subject is feeling, which can aid officials in honing their line of questioning.

To LISTEN to the entire interview click here
What do you think of Dr. Matsumoto’s Interview? 

“Seeing” Happiness”

© Dana Rothstein | Dreamstime Stock Photos

According to Medical Xpress, if you try to see happiness in the facial expressions of others it can reduce your aggressiveness.

Professors Marcus Munafo and Ian Penton-Voak, from the University of Bristol,  delved into the relationship between the recognition of emotions in ambiguous facial expressions and aggressive thoughts and behavior. They looked at healthy adults and at high-risk adolescents (for committing a crime).

What was the result of the study, published in the journal of Psychological Sciences?

The researchers found that they could modify a person’s bias in emotion recognition and encourage them to see Happiness  by showing participants composite images of happy, angry or emotionally ambiguous facial expressions and then asking them to rate them as happy or angry, which allowed the researchers to establish a baseline for how likely a participant was to see an ambiguous face as angry.

Professors Munafo and Penton-Voak then used the results to encourage some of the participants away from this negativity bias by telling them that some of the ambiguous faces they had previously labelled as angry were in fact happy.

Basically, the study conditioned participants to view ambiguous faces as happy faces too. In doing so many participants reported lower levels of anger and aggression in themselves.

“Our results provide strong evidence that emotion processing plays a causal role in anger and the maintenance of aggressive behavior.  This could potentially lead to novel behavioral treatments in the future,” noted professor Munafo

An interesting fact is that in testing this result further, the researchers found that participants shown only angry faces shifted their perceptions and became more likely to see Happiness in ambiguous faces as well as reporting lower levels of anger and aggression in themselves.
What do you see in regular faces; sadness, anger, discomfort, or happiness?