What are the Key Ingredients to Effective Intercultural Interactions?

Dr. David Matsumoto, Director of Humintell, recently led a free webinar where he provided participants with an overview of major research findings concerning keys to effective intercultural communication, as well as practical tips to interact with others from different cultures.

Most of us live in a multi-cultural society where effective intercultural communication is crucial. This is as a result of technology and other advancements. The world is getting smaller every day!

The Difference Between Cross-Cultural Adaptation vs Adjustment

Dr. Matsumoto believes at the heart of all intercultural communication and interactions is a process of adaptation and adjustment. Many scholars do not delineate between these two concepts.

Adaptation refers to the process of altering one’s behavior to fit in with a changed environment or circumstances.

Adjustment refers to the subjective experiences that are associated with, result from, or are consequences of, adaptation, and that motivate further adaptation. Dr. Matsumoto explains adjustment in laymen’s terms as “how we feel about what we’re doing”.

Living in any society in any culture requires a constant process of adaptation and adjustment, as noted in the above graphic. This process also encapsulates the underlying process of growth.

Defining Successful Intercultural Communication

How does Dr. Matsumoto define successful intercultural communication?

He outlines 4 factors that play a part, as seen in the graphic below.

1. Having successful relationships with people from other cultures.
2. Feeling that interactions are warm, cordial, respectful, and cooperative.
3. Accomplishing tasks in an effective and efficient manner.
4. All of the above, and the ability to manage psychological stress effectively.

Research has shown there are a lot of different types of people in terms of how they adapt and adjust in different cultures.

There’s many people who adapt (change their behaviors) but don’t adjust well. Adjustment problems may manifest itself in depression or anxiety or substance abuse problems.

Then there’s people who feel things are perfectly fine but they’re not adapting well.

Adaptation and adjustment go hand in hand when discussing intercultural interactions and intercultural communications.

The Contact Hypothesis (Allport, 1954)

So what does the science say about intercultural adjustment and communication?

One very important concept is called the Contact Hypothesis which is the proposition that contact between groups is effective in reducing prejudice.

One study that tested the contact hypothesis was known as The Robbers Cave Experiment where two group of boys were invited to participate in a summer camp (which in reality was part of a study in intergroup relationships).

The boys were separated into two groups (Rattlers and Eagles) and when the groups were unaware of each other, group activities were directed at building unity and cohesion.

During the second week, the two groups were brought together in a competitive environment where the other group became an obstacle to resources.

It was during this competitive period that the groups became hostile toward one another, calling each other names and even engaging in physical fights.

After a period of conflict, the groups participated in a superordinate goal and hostile feelings between groups were reduced after researchers allowed the groups to work cooperatively.

The Robbers Cave Experiment showed that when two groups feel mutually interdependent, hostility between groups subsides.

Key Psychological Ingredients to Effective Intercultural Competence

There’s also a large body of research that have examined what key psychological ingredients (skills, traits, abilities) can help intercultural competence effectiveness.

The instruments that have been developed examine traits have been shown across the last 50 years to be indicative of effective cross-cultural communication.

These tests include the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ), Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS), and Intercultural Adjustment Potential Scale (ICAPS).

A 2013 study entitled Assessing Cross-Cultural Competence: A Review of Available Tests by Matsumoto and Hwang reviewed the validity of all existing instruments.

They found that the most important predictor of successful cross-cultural adaptation was emotional robustness aka emotion regulation.

Learn More About The Basics of Emotional Intelligence by Clicking Here.

Negative emotional reactions from cultural differences are inevitable. Adapting to these differences well require people to regulate their emotions well so they can acquire new skills and behaviors.

Final Tips and Advice for Next Steps

Dr. Matsumoto concluded his webinar by offering some helpful tips.

1. Get exposure to different people and cultures

2. Engage in activities or training to improve your own emotion regulation skills

He ended the webinar by playing the video below about Tarra and Bella- The elephant and dog who became best friends.

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Humintell Director David Matsumoto recently appeared on the Social-Engineer Podcast: The Doctor Is In Series – where they discuss understandings and developments in the field of psychology.

In their latest episode, Social Engineer CEO Chris Hadnagy and Director of Education Dr. Abbie Marono interview Dr. Matsumoto on the topics of emotion and nonverbal communication.

The Origins of Human Emotion

They began the podcast by speaking about the origins of human emotion where he addressed claims that facial expressions of emotion are not innate or universal in nature.

Dr. Matsumoto points out that the thought that emotions are not innate and entirely constructed is actually a minority thought or concept within the field itself, although it gets a lot of traction.

Matsumoto’s Olympic Study

They discuss Dr. Matsumoto’s famous Olympic Judo Study entitled Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion of Congenitally and Noncongenitally Blind Individuals.

This study was conducted at the 2004 Athens Olympic and Paralympic Games where photographs were taken during medal matches in the judo competition.

From these images, Dr. Matsumoto and his team were able to study the first reactions of these judo athletes when they won or lost a medal match.

The results of this study of 84 athletes from 34 countries, showed that winners were immediately smiling. Losers generally showed sadness or disgust or anger. Importantly, there were no cultural differences in these reactions.

Additional images were taken of Paralympic athletes, many of them who were congenitally blind from birth. Researchers compared the images of the sighted and non-sighted athletes and found an amazing amount of similarity between them.

This research (and many others like it) suggests that the capacity to have emotions and facial expressions of emotion is biologically innate.

Behavioral Indicators of Mal-Intent

The conversation then shifted to discussing behavioral indicators of malicious intent.

Dr. Matsumoto emphasizes that much of his research and work has focused on immediate threats and is relevant for those who work at security checkpoints or in harm’s way. He delved into some of the research he’s conducted and their results.

A Writer’s Obligation

They discuss the anonymity and human factors that affect behavior as well as Dr. Matsumoto’s 7th Edition of his book Culture and Psychology.

He emphasizes that he now wants to focus his energy and knowledge on helping others.

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“Who’s so cute? Yes you are. You’re so cute, aren’t you?”

In fact, research has even suggested that dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans (especially women) use to talk to babies.

But an interesting new study entitled “The face behind the caring voice: A comparative study on facial prosodic features of dog-, infant- and adult-directed communication” has has spotted a crucial difference:

When baby talking to infants, our faces tend to be overly expressive—wide-open eyes, high eyebrows, and exaggerated smiles. With dogs, we’re far more stoic, researchers report in a new study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Dogs and Baby Talk

Scientists have been studying baby talk with dogs (and more recently, cats) for more than 40 years. In fact research has found similarities between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.

But little work has been done on the facial expressions that go along with the baby talk.

Anna Gergely, an evolutionary biologist and dog owner wondered whether there might be differences between how we coo to our fur babies and our human ones. So she designed a study to answer that question.

Dog Study Methodology

In the new study, Gergely and her colleagues recruited 23 Hungarian couples who had both a baby between 6 months and 18 months old and a pet dog.

While visiting the families in their homes, the researchers asked the parents to speak three short monologues individually to the dog, the baby, and the other parent.

The monologues involved things like teaching a new word, reciting a nursery rhyme, or reading a script of everyday sentences such as, “What nice weather!”

Gergely and her colleagues filmed the parents’ faces while they were speaking to their partner, pet and infant. Later, the researchers used “face-reading” software to analyze the parents’ facial expressions and muscle movements.

Dog Study Results

Gergely’s study suggested that the parents’ faces were the most intensely expressive—with more exaggerated expressions—when talking to their babies, especially when reciting the nursery rhyme and scripted sentences.

The facial expression recognition software ranked their expressions as particularly happy and often evoking surprise, Gergely says.

By contrast, participants had the least amount of facial muscle movement and the most neutral expressions when they were talking to their dogs—even though they seemed to be using a voice nearly identical to what they used with their babies.

Dr. Matsumoto’s Thoughts

Dr. Matsumoto thinks it is far fetched to suggest that humans talking to dogs know or have memorialized different meanings of faces in the animal kingdom.

Instead he suggests that there are many possible reasons why humans may be more expressive with infants than with their canine companions.

Here are a few:

1. When humans talking to infants they are even more animated, which requires additional signaling. In turn, this additional signaling recruits more behaviors, including faces. Another difference not discussed is that human – infant signaling is stronger, i.e., more intense.

2. Humans unconsciously speak animatedly for infants to learn about how to read facial expressions. This is less important for other animals.

3. Infants can verbalize many different emotional states, and can thus refer to them in their facial expressions. Infants will learn about multiple states and their links to language. This is less important and not required for animals.

What do you think about the possibilities Dr. Matsumoto outlined above? Which do you think is most plausible?

The post Study: We Use “Baby Talk” With Our Dogs But Not Baby Faces first appeared on Humintell.

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Primary Emotions vs Basic Emotions

Many people don’t distinguish between primary and basic emotions to categorize different types of emotions. In fact, some scientists do not distinguish between them either.

You may know of a well known emotion theory by a psychologist named Robert Pluchik.

Pluchik had a well known emotion wheel where he described emotions. He termed emotions primary but he also referred to them as basic.

Paul Ekman and other scientists talked about basic emotions, but not necessarily primary emotions.

Many people interchange the two terms and interchanging occurs across different scholars and writers.

Basic Emotions: Elemental Emotions

Dr. Matsumoto prefers to use the term “basic” to refer to “basic emotions” because the term “basic” refers to those emotions that can be considered elemental.

That is, basic emotions are the most rudimentary set of emotions that exist in humans.

Dr. Matsumoto also likes the term “basic emotions” because if you consider them to include elemental or rudimentary set of emotions, they allow one to consider how they can combine with other emotions.

In addition, basic emotions can combine with cognitions or contexts to produce other emotional experiences that we have in human life and that we label in language.

For example, extreme sadness when experienced at a death of a loved on or a funeral may be called grief or mourning. Anger and sadness that occur when we perceive one of our loved one as coveted by someone else may be called jealousy.

In this way, having a concept called “basic emotions” allow us to consider how other somewhat more complex emotional states and experiences that are actually mapped in language can be produced when they combine with other emotions or other cognitions or other contexts.

Basic emotions they refer to an elemental set of emotions that allow us to think about how those emotions are used in combination with other emotions, cognitions or contexts to map our emotional life in language.

It is important to note that different scholars have different specific emotions in whatever list they consider basic and we have a separate blog about that.

Primary and Secondary Emotions: Refer to Sequence

Dr. Matsumoto prefers to use he term primary emotions to refer to sequence because the word primary has a sequential or temporal aspect to it. That is, primary emotions refer to emotions that occur in a sequence.

Primary emotions refer to the first or initial emotional reactions that a person can have that is triggered in a certain situation.

When thought about in this way, this gives rise to the thought of secondary emotions (emotions that occur next after the primary emotion in a sequence).

Secondary emotions are really interesting to think about because sometimes these emotions may be in relation to the context.

For example, judo athletes may go from sadness about a loss to anger or vice versa. So the initial emotion (sadness) would be the primary emotion and the secondary (anger) would be the secondary emotion.

Secondary Emotions: Reactions about Reactions

Another type of secondary emotion are emotions that we have about the initial emotional reaction (reactions about reactions).

For example, some people like the fact that they get afraid. You may know them as sensation seekers- those that like seeing horror movies or go bungee jumping.

Some people are happy about being happy; their secondary emotion to happiness is happiness. These people may be  pleasant to be around.

Some other people may like being angry so they’re probably not as nice to be around.

But Dr. M’s main point here is that he thinks of primary and secondary emotions is referring to a temporal sequence rather than compared to basic emotions which refer to an elemental or rudimentary set of emotions.

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The first thing to remember about reading faces concerns whether they are displaying an emotion or not.

Remember, emotions are reactions to events that are meaningful to someone and that potentially impact their survival. Thus, facial expressions of emotion go on and off the face relatively quickly.

Single episodes of normal emotional expressions that are not concealed (what we call macroexpressions) go on and off the face between 0.5 and 5 seconds.

Microexpressions (signs of concealed, suppressed, or repressed thoughts and feelings) occur less than 0.5.

Both macro and microexpressions are reactions, and this is true with smiles associated with emotions as well.

LEARN HOW TO READ MICROEXPRESSIONS

Genuine Smiles

When smiles are reactions (i.e., they go on and off the face) and they occur by themselves, they are likely to be signs of enjoyment, amusement, happiness, contentment, or some other positive emotion label (thus, there are as many labels for these smiles as there are positive emotion words in culture’s language).

When they are macroexpressions, these smiles are likely to be Duchenne smiles – genuine smiles that involve not only the lip corners being pulled up and diagonally but also the muscle around the eyes (orbicularis oculi).

This muscle raises the cheeks, stretching the skin and giving it a shiny appearance, and creates crow’s feet wrinkles at the side of the eyes for many.

When the reaction smiles are microexpressions, they may not have this muscle activated because micros can involve only parts of the full-face expression.

Reaction Smiles 

When smiles are reactions and they occur with other body movements, the smiles can signal other emotions.

For example, a reaction smile with head and gaze down and a hand to the face may be signs of embarrassment, shame, or humiliation (more emotion labels).

A smile with head tilted up, gaze up, chest puffed up, and hands on the hips (arms akimbo) may be signs of pride (and other synonyms of it).

Reaction smiles that occur with other facial expressions of emotion are interesting but the analysis is the same.

If the expression (including the smile) is a reaction, then there is likely positive emotion along with the other emotional expression. Thus, when a reaction smile occurs with a reactive angry expression, a person is likely experiencing an anger-enjoyment blend.

Smiles as Secondary Emotions

Then there are reaction smiles that occur sequentially (not blended) with other emotional expressions. Oftentimes the reaction smile might occur after another emotional expression.

These are what we call secondary emotions. What are secondary emotions? They are emotions that we have about other emotions.

Some people like the fact that they get angry and so they may smile after being angry (watch out for those people). Some people like to experience fear (think sensation seekers); they may smile after showing and experiencing fear.

These secondary emotions are the reason that horror movies are popular with a segment of the population.

Social Smiles

But smiles that occur with other emotional expressions are often not reactions; instead, they are what we call social smiles.

These are smiles that typically do not include the muscle around the eye and are not signs of enjoyment, amusement, or happiness emotional reactions; they are learned, voluntary smiles (but be careful; contrary to popular belief, many people can voluntarily produce Duchenne smiles).

Importantly, social smiles are not emotions; when they occur, they can stay on the face for a long time, much longer than four or five seconds.

And people can produce them anytime because they are used in all cultures as signs of politeness, pleasantness, courtesy, etc. (more smile labels).

Social smiles grease the wheels of all societies and cultures. Sometimes they look like they may be pasted on a person’s face (remember, they’re not reactions).

Smiles that Qualify or Comment on Emotion

When social smiles occur with other emotional reactions, they qualify or comment on those other emotions.

• A social smile with an angry expression softens the display of anger.
• A social smile with a sad expression (aka a miserable smile) says that even though you’re sad, things will be all right.
• A social smile with a fearful expression says the same – even though you’re afraid, things will be OK.
• And the pasted, asymmetrical smiles (aka smirks or dominant smiles, other labels) are signs of personality (arrogance, another label).

Then there’s all the social smiles that occur in the vast number of different contexts of life, many of which have been given cute names in the past. When you think about it, these are all tied to specific contexts.

Thus, there’s the all the different types of smiles you can read about elsewhere, such as:

• Reward smiles
• Affiliative smiles
• Flirtatious smiles
• Lonely smiles
• Dampened smiles
• Fake smiles
• Wistful smiles
• Polite smiles
• Pan Am smiles
• Chaplin smile
• Forced smiles
• Uncomfortable smile
• Sarcastic smiles
• Love smiles
• Interested smiles
• Seductive smile
• Courtship smiles
• Dazzling smiles
• Etc. etc.

All of these are social smiles that may include other body movements (e.g., sideways look, touching the hair with the flirtatious smile) that occur in specific contexts. And some reaction smiles of enjoyment also occur in specific contexts, such as what is known as schadenfreude (joy in someone else’s misfortunes)

Because these are all labels of smiles that occur in a specific context, it goes to reason that there are as many possible smiles to interpret and label as there are the various contexts of life.

But the smile itself is always the same – lip corners up and diagonal.

What differs is whether that particular expression in that particular context is important enough in our culture and everyday language to give it a specific label. Words and phrases are symbols that depict real life phenomena in language so that we can talk about them, and cultures and language reify or lift up specific phenomena of life that are important to those cultures for whatever reason.

Thus, there’s probably a gazillion types of smiles out there if you tie a smile with a context and want to label it. Or only two – smiles of true positive emotions and social smiles.

The post How Many Types of Smiles Are There? Smiles And Their Meaning first appeared on Humintell.

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Most people know the power of music and the emotions music can invoke. Listen to a happy song with an upbeat tone and you may find yourself tapping your feet. Listen to a sad song and it may bring tears to your eyes.

In fact, research has shown that music can activate our autonomic nervous system and even cause shivers down the spine.

A fascinating new study also suggests that music’s power to unify emotions and movements may have played a role in human evolution, fostering social bonds and community.

Music and Emotion Research

The recent music and emotion research study out of Turku PET Center in Finland reveals that music’s emotional impact transcends cultures, evoking similar bodily sensations around the world.

Researchers found that happy music energizes arms and legs, while sad tunes resonate in the chest.

The results of the study entitled “Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures” were on 25 January 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This cross-cultural study had a total of 1,500 participants who completed an online survey.

Western and Asian participants rated the emotions and bodily sensations evoked by Western and Asian songs.

The emotions and bodily sensations evoked by music were similar across Western and Asian listeners. The bodily sensations were also linked with the music-induced emotions.

“Certain acoustic features of music were associated with similar emotions in both Western and Asian listeners. Music with a clear beat was found happy and danceable while dissonance in music was associated with aggressiveness. Since these sensations are similar across different cultures, music-induced emotions are likely independent of culture and learning and based on inherited biological mechanisms,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa.

Similar to universal facial expressions of emotion, this recent musical study suggests that music’s influence on the body is universal across cultures. It also suggests people moving to music in all cultures and synchronized postures, movements and vocalizations is a universal sign for affiliation.

The researchers suggest that music may have emerged during the evolution of human species to promote social interaction and sense of community by synchronizing the bodies and emotions of the listeners.

Universal Emotions in Music

The idea that music produces universal emotional responses has been studied before.

Research led by Eline Adrianne Smit and colleagues from the MARCS Institute for Brain suggests certain elements of music are hard-wired into the human central nervous system.

Smit and colleagues asked musicians and non-musicians in Sydney, Australia as well as different communities from Papua New Guinea with varying degrees of exposure to Western music, to associate major and minor melodies with either happiness or sadness.

The researchers found that the degree of familiarity with Western music corresponded with the association between major melodies with happiness, and minor melodies with sadness.

This study suggests that familiarity through cultural exposure plays and important factor when associating major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness respectively.

Interestingly, major chords tend to appear more frequently than minor chords in popular music and research shows that humans are likely to attribute positive emotions to things that we are familiar with.

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Dr. David Matsumoto, Director of Humintell, led a free webinar on The Basics of Social Influence where he provided participants with an introduction to evidenced-based topics of social influence.

These included the topics of:

• Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience
• Cooperation
• Emotion Contagion
• Social Loafing and Social Striving
• Leadership
• Persuasion and Influence

Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience

In social science and social psychology these topics (conformity, compliance and obedience) are generally considered together within the larger rubric of social influence.

They are all important constructs in any social system as ways of reinforcing behaviors.

Some of these words may have a negative connotation, but in reality they are important concepts for any group or society as ways of reinforcing behaviors.

Definitions of conformity, compliance and obedience can be found in the graphic to the left.

In this area of psychology there are a few studies that form the backbone of what we know about these three topics. Let’s explore them!

The Ash Experiments

A researcher named Solomon Ash conducted a very well-known set of experiments that are some of the first and classic studies on conformity and compliance.

In one of his most famous studies, a participant went into a room with seven confederates who were part of the experimental team.

The participants were given lines (see example). You can see there is a target line and other lines on the right hand side.

Every person in the room was asked which line on the right hand side matches the target line on the left. There was an obvious correct and incorrect answer.

The results of the study showed that when the participant is the last to answer and everyone before them has given the incorrect answer, it increases the likelihood that the participant will also give the incorrect answer.

On average 32% conformed to the incorrect answer. In over 12 trials, 75% conformed at least once.

The Milgram Experiments

Like the Ash experiments, any people have heard about the Milgram experiments led by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.

In one of his most famous studies (that could not be conducted today due to ethical reasons), Milgram recruited 40 men to come to a laboratory with equipment that was labeled with shock danger warnings.

The participant was told that they are the teacher who is going to deliver a shock to a student in a neighboring room. They couldn’t see the student (and who was not actually being shocked contrary to what the participant is told).

Every time the student answered a question wrong, the participant was instructed to deliver a shock to them of increasing intensity. The student in the other room banged on the wall, made other sounds, then eventually went silent.

The participants asked the experimenter if they should continue (to which they are told yes). In the study with 40 men, 26 delivered the maximum shock and 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels.

Like the Ash study, the Milgram studies demonstrates an amazing amount of conformity and obedience.

Over the years, these findings have been replicated many times all around the world in various countries suggesting that conformity, compliance and obedience may be universal human phenomenons.

Cooperation

Cooperation refers to people’s ability to work together towards common goals. Cooperation is necessary in every society and based on unique cognitive abilities, especially a concept called shared intentionality.

Dr. Matsumoto believes that shared intentionality is at the root of human cultures. He also believes that the main purpose and function of human communication including language and non-verbal behavior is to share intentions.

Cooperation is a universal phenomenon that is part of the basis of social influence. It has been studied extensively in social psychology.

However, there is some research that suggest there are cultural and individual differences in cooperation.

Some research suggests that the rates of cooperation tends to be higher in collectivistic societies (e.g. East Asia, SE Asia, Latin/South America) compared to individualistic societies (e.g. USA, Canada).

Additional research suggests that individual differences in cooperation exist due to levels of trustworthiness (high trusters vs low trusters).

Research on cooperation has also been conducted regarding the sanctioning systems across various cultures as well as inter and intra-cultural environments.

Dr. Matsumoto’s research suggests that when people from different cultures come together, they generally cooperate less.

Emotion Contagion

The concept of emotion contagion started with researcher Elaine Hatfield and others in 1993.

What is emotion contagion?

Emotion contagion is a phenomenon when someone’s emotions lead to or produce similar emotions in others.

What Hatfield and colleagues have demonstrated is when there’s a group of people, one person or several people’s emotions can affect the emotions of the rest of the people.

Why does emotion contagion occur?

The truth is that science has not gotten to the point where we know exactly why emotion contagion occurs.

However, there’s interesting literature within the emotion contagion literature that pertain to what’s called mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are essentially special types of brain cells that are triggered when viewing the actions of other individuals. For example, when we see another person fall and hurt themselves, our mirror neurons trigger the part of our own brain that would be activated if we had fallen.

Facial feedback is another concept that suggests that when we have an expression on our face our brains tell us we’re having that emotion and thus turns our emotional system on inside of us.

This may be the reason why some research suggests that smiling can improve your mood. 

Social Loafing and Social Striving

When people are in a group and they have a task to do, sometimes individual productivity and motivation is reduced. This concept is called social loafing.

Social loafing has led to the concept of freeriders- members of a group who are not producing as much as others

On the other hand, there’s the opposite effect called social striving. Sometimes working in a group enhances individual performance rather than diminish it so then the product of the group is greater than the sum of the individual members.

One factor that has been shown to influence whether members of a group either loaf or strive is leadership.

Research has put issues faced by leaders into two buckets: 1) task performance and 2) group maintenance.

There has been extensive studies about the characteristics of leaders that are universally endorsed all around the world and the most influential set of researchers are known as the GLOBE project.

The GLOBE project has produced a number of amazing findings that are universally endorsed as good leaders are:

• Charisma: ability to connect and persuade others
• Team Orientation: focus on the team as a whole
• Empathy: the degree to which leaders are perceived as being empathetic

Persuasion and Influence

Without a doubt, the most influential psychologist in the area of persuasion and influence is Robert Cialdini.

The seven psychological principles underlying persuasion, influence, and compliance that Cialdini has compiled are:

• Reciprocity
• Consistency
• Social Proof (related to conformity)
• Liking (related to cooperation)
• Authority (related to obedience)
• Scarcity
• Unity

Cialdini has done an amazing amount of research himself but has also done a great job of integrating the knowledge in the field to come up with these various principles of persuasion and influence.

One of the points that Cialdini makes which Dr. Matsumoto finds absolutely true is that these principles exist because societies and cultures and all groups need them.

These principles work because they work to mobilize emotion, either through what’s known as cognitive dissonance or anxiety or something that motivates people to alleviate their emotion.

Other Social Influence Constructs

There are actually many other social influence constructs that have been demonstrated and documented in science including:

• Mere Exposure Effect
• Trust and Trustworthiness
• Rapport

Want to Learn More?

Our Tactical Social Influence Workshop, explores how to use various psychological techniques to discern points of views and detect nonverbal emotions, behaviors, and reactions in order to advocate, influence, and convince others.

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Dr. Matsumoto doesn’t believe anger is inherently a “bad” emotion. Getting angry can result in some good in our lives and in society. Anger, and all other basic emotions, exist for a reason.

In fact, according to new research by Heather Lench et al, anger can be a powerful motivator for people to achieve challenging goals in their lives.

Their study entitled Anger Has Benefits for Attaining Goals was recently published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Anger Study Methodology

Lench and her team of researchers conducted a series of 6 different experiments involving more than 1,000 participants and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 respondents.

In each experiment, researchers elicited either an emotional response (such as anger, amusement, desire or sadness) or a neutral emotional state, and then presented participants with a challenging goal.

Participants were then asked to perform various tasks such as solves a series of word puzzles or attain high scores on a skiing video game.

Anger Study Results

Across all the experiments, anger improved people’s ability to reach their goals compared with a neutral condition in a variety of challenging situations.

Here is a summary of the 6 study results taken from the article’s abstract:

1. Anger resulted in more difficult puzzles solved correctly.
2. Anger increased cheating rates and numbers of unearned prizes.
3. With a goal to do well in a video game, Anger increased scores on a game with challenges to be avoided, but not other scores.
4. In two studies, examining the consequences of anger in response to the challenging task that was the focus of that anger, anger decreased reaction time with goals to win trials.
5. Anger also predicted making the effort to vote in two contentious elections.
6. With a goal to protect financial resources, anger increased action taken to prevent loss compared to a physiological arousal condition.

Anger Implications

The functionalist theory of emotion, which has been studied for decades, suggests that all emotions, good or bad, are reactions to events within a person’s environment and serve the purpose of alerting that person to important situations that require actions.

Each emotion may call for a different response. For example, sadness may indicate that a person needs to seek help or emotional support, while anger may suggest they need to take action to overcome an obstacle.

“People often believe that a state of happiness is ideal, and the majority of people consider the pursuit of happiness a major life goal,” said lead author Heather Lench, Ph.D., a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University.

“The view that positive emotion is ideal for mental health and well-being has been prominent in lay and psychological accounts of emotion, but previous research suggests that a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, result in the best outcomes.”

“These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success,” said Lench.

Appraisal Theories of Emotion

Indeed, most emotion scientists (including Humintell Director Dr. Matsumoto) 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.

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.

We’ve written about this extensively in a past blog entitled “What Triggers Emotions in Humans?”

The results of this study make perfect sense as the universal, psychological theme that triggers anger all around the world is goal obstruction.

That is, anger is the emotion that is triggered when our goals are blocked or obstructed.

When our goals are blocked, anger helps prepare our bodies to fight in order to removal those obstacles. This may perhaps explain why participants performed better on certain tasks when this emotion was elicited.

Want to improve your ability to detect anger as well as the other basic emotions?

Take a look at our best-selling emotion recognition training program, MiX Enhanced!

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Researchers Kristine Kahr Nilsson, et al investigated this question by comparing the emotion decoding abilities of major depressive disorder (MDD) patients with and without a history of childhood maltreatment.

The results of their study suggests that individuals who have experienced childhood maltreatment and suffer from depression tend to have greater difficulty understanding and decoding emotions in others’ faces.

Their findings appeared in their paper entitled “Valence in the eyes: An emotion decoding profile of adults with major depressive disorder and a history of childhood maltreatment” which was published in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy.

What is Major Depressive Disorder?

Also known as Clinical Depression, Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a common mental health condition that affects millions of people worldwide. In fact, over 8% of adults living in the United States have experienced at least one major depressive episode.

MDD is typically characterized by persistent sadness, low energy, and difficulty finding joy in daily life. It can affect how you feel and your ability to function on a day-to-day basis.

While substantial progress has been made in recent years to understand depression, it’s a complex condition with different variations. Researchers have been exploring various factors that may contribute to depression and its severity, and one area of interest is childhood experiences.

What is Childhood Maltreatment?

Childhood maltreatment encompasses various forms of abuse and neglect that some individuals endure during their early years. These experiences can have lasting effects on mental health and well-being.

Child maltreatment is a global problem with serious life-long consequences. International studies reveal that nearly 3 in 4 children aged 2-4 years regularly suffer physical punishment and/or psychological violence at the hands of parents.

Previous studies such at this meta analysis have also suggested a link between childhood maltreatment and a higher risk of developing depression later in life.

However, not all individuals with depression have experienced childhood maltreatment, and researchers want to understand why some individuals with depression may have more severe symptoms and difficulties in their daily lives.

Study Methodology

For their study, the Danish researchers recruited 342 participants who had been formally diagnosed with MDD by medical professionals and were receiving antidepressant medication.

The participants were asked about their experiences of childhood maltreatment using a questionnaire called the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire (ACE-Q). This questionnaire included questions about different types of maltreatment, such as emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, as well as emotional and physical neglect during their first 18 years of life.

Reading Emotions

To assess their emotion decoding abilities, the participants completed a test known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET).

This test has been widely used to measure theory of mind—the ability to recognize and understand another person’s mental state—or social intelligence by looking at the subtle expressions in people’s eyes. It contains various sub-tests that require participants to determine the emotional state expressed by photos of faces.

The Findings

The study’s findings revealed that individuals with MDD who had a history of childhood maltreatment exhibited poorer emotion decoding abilities compared to those with MDD but no such history.

This suggests that early life experiences, such as childhood maltreatment, can influence an individual’s ability to understand and interpret emotions in others, particularly in the context of facial expressions.

Interestingly, the difficulties in emotion decoding were most pronounced when it came to positive and negative emotions, while no significant differences were observed for neutral emotions.

This suggests that individuals who have experienced childhood maltreatment may struggle more when trying to understand the emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear in others.

Important Implications for Clinical Practice

It’s crucial for healthcare professionals to recognize that individuals with MDD and a history of childhood maltreatment may face additional challenges in their treatment journey.

Understanding their difficulties in emotion decoding can guide tailored interventions to improve their social interactions and overall well-being.

Study Limitations

While this study provides valuable insights, it’s essential to acknowledge its limitations.

One limitation is that childhood maltreatment was measured retrospectively through self-report, which may be subject to memory biases.

Future research can delve deeper into the developmental and neurological processes underlying emotion decoding difficulties in individuals with MDD who have a history of childhood maltreatment. Understanding these mechanisms can help refine treatment strategies and provide better support for this subgroup of individuals.

“It remains to be examined whether the identified emotion decoding problems in MDD patients with childhood maltreatment exacerbate their depressive symptoms,” Nilsson said. “This would be a relevant subject for investigation in a longitudinal study that follows these patients over time.”

Face-to-Face Interaction in Preventing Depression

Previous research suggests that there are unsurpassed mental health benefits of regular face-to-face social interactions, particularly among older adults.

Study participants who regularly met in person with family and friends were less likely to report symptoms of depression, compared with participants who emailed or spoke on the phone. The gains people derived from face-to-face socializing endured even years later.

The findings were published online today in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

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You may even know that cats usually don’t meow to each other, only to humans (a tactic developed through adaptation and evolution).

But how do cats communicate with each other?

Recent research that studied domestic cats in a cat cafe in California shows they do “talk” to each other and that their means of communication amongst themselves are even more complex than we originally thought.

The study entitled “Feline Faces: Unraveling the Social Function of Domestic Cat Facial Signals” was recently published in Behavioural Processes.

In it researchers tallied nearly 300 different feline facial expressions (276 to be exact), used to communicate hostile and friendly intent and everything in between.

What’s even more fascinating, researchers believe cats may have evolved this range of sneers, smiles, and grimaces over the course of their 10,000-year history with humans.

The Cat Study Methodology

Over 10 months, researchers Lauren Scott and Brittany N. Florkiewicz observed 53 domestic shorthair cats in a Los Angeles cat cafe and recorded 186 separate meetings between the animals.

The team recorded 194 minutes of footage after the café closed to visitors for the day and focused specifically on recording and reviewing the cats’ facial expressions when interacting with each other.

After obtaining the recordings, they used the Facial Action Coding Systems designed for cats and compared the complexity and compositionality of facial signals produced in affiliative and non-affiliative contexts.

To measure complexity and compositionality, they examined the number and types of facial muscle movements (AUs) observed in each signal.

Similarly, research scientists who study facial expressions of emotion in humans also use FACS and AUs to code faces and facial muscles specifically.

276 Unique Cat Facial Expressions Found

After observing, recording, coding and studying the cats’ facial expressions, researchers found 276 unique facial expressions (which is not far removed from the 357 expressions produced by chimpanzees).

These different expressions were sorted into 2 major categories

• Friendly: which constituted 45% of the expressions
• Aggressive: which made up 37% of the expressions

The remaining 18% were too ambiguous to clearly categorize.

According to Florkiewicz, each cat expression combined about four of 26 unique facial movements, including parted lips, jaw drops, dilated or constricted pupils, blinks and half blinks, pulled lip corners, nose licks, protracted or retracted whiskers, and/or various ear positions.

By comparison, the human face includes over 40 structurally and functionally anatomically independent muscles, each of which can innervate independently of each other. This makes the face one of the most complex signal systems available to humans.

According to Science Magazine, what exactly the felines were “saying” to one another with these expressions remains unclear, Florkiewicz says. But overall, cats tend to move their ears and whiskers toward another cat during friendly interactions, and to move them away from their compatriot during unfriendly interactions. Constricted pupils and licking lips also tend to accompany such rivalrous encounters.

Interestingly, some of the cats’ friendly expressions resemble those made by people, dogs, monkeys, and other animals. This suggests that these species may share “a common play face.”

Although the researchers haven’t been able to compare their results with those of wild felines, they do know that all close relatives of the domestic cat are ferociously solitary animals.

Pet cats might have retained some of that defensive communication, Florkiewicz says, but these domestic descendants probably started to pick up friendly facial expressions as they gathered to await humans’ dinner leftovers.

Historically cats have received less research attention than their canine counterparts and their cognitive abilities were less recognized. However, in the last 10 years, research focusing on trying to better understand our feline companions has grown.

To read more about how good your cat is at emotion recognition, visit this past blog post.

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