Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

The Importance of Eyebrows in Emotion Expression

It may be easy to live your entire life without giving your eyebrows a second thought, but in reality, they’re an incredibly important social communication tool.

As reported in the Independent, “Your eyebrows reflect your inner mental and emotional landscape with amazing speed and specificity. They are involved not just in emotional expression, but also in emotion perception in social situations”.

Turns out researchers have been studying facial hair (including eyebrows) and the role they play in emotion expression. Read on to learn more about what the research says.

Why Do We Have Eyebrows?

Eyebrows are a big part of our appearance and are one of the most distinct features of your whole face. 

One of the most important roles eyebrows play is to protect your eyes from moisture such as rain or sweat. The shape of your brows themselves, along with the hair help force water away from your eyes so you can still see.

While protecting our eyes may have been their original purpose, eyebrows found themselves playing a secondary role somewhere along the line: conveying emotion.

What Are Eyebrows For?

Eyebrows are one of the most expressive features of your face and helps you communicate all kinds of messages non-verbally.

Different eyebrow positions convey different emotions like happiness, surprise or anger.

According to Discover Magazine, “A 2018 study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution investigated why early hominins’ brow ridges were so much larger and more rigid than modern humans’ ridges. They found that having more mobile eyebrows likely helped our ancestors to form relationships and ensure survival in groups. Eyebrow hair, the researchers say, simply increased the visibility of this form of communication.”

Fascinatingly, our eyebrows may be involved not just in emotional expression but in emotion perception.

Research has shown that along with the rest of your face and body, your eyebrows may spontaneously mimic the people you interact with in social situations.

Why Dogs Have Eyebrows but Wolves Don’t

puppy-dog-eyesInterestingly, using our eyebrows to communicate emotion does not seem to be a uniquely human trait.

Dogs were domesticated from wolves over 33,000 years ago and, during that time, selection processes have shaped both their anatomy and behavior.

Eyebrow movement plays a major role in human communication and dogs have a muscle in the eyebrow region that gray wolves don’t.

The fact that dogs can lift their eyebrows to communicate with humans is probably one reason many think of our dogs as children.

Eyebrows give dogs a wider range of human-like facial expressions we can identify with and they play a vital role in how dogs became “man’s best friend.”

Evolutionary psychologists believe that centuries of domestication “transformed the facial muscle anatomy of dogs specifically for facial communication with humans,” write the authors of a 2019 study published in PNAS.

For more on how dogs are born ready to read body language and are capable of communicating and interacting with humans at a very young age read our past blog post:

Puppies Read Body Language

What About Beards?

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested a reason for why we grow beards.

He suggested that beards were an example of sexual selection and may have evolved “to charm or excite the opposite sex” — while also intimidating the competition.

Researchers tend to think the same, for example, of lion’s manes, which may signal to other lions that the mane-bearer is in good health and a formidable opponent. 

An interesting 2019 study published in Psychological Science suggests Darwin’s hypothesis is possible.

The researchers investigated whether beards enhance recognition of threatening expressions, such as anger.

The results of their study suggested that found that, “the presence of a beard increased the speed and accuracy with which participants recognized displays of anger but not happiness”.

Bonus fact: If a man never shaves his beard it can grow up to 30 feet long during his lifetime.

The post The Importance of Eyebrows in Emotion Expression first appeared on Humintell.

Can AI Tell Your Politics By Looking At Your Face?

Believe it or not, the 2024 Presidential Election is right around the corner. And according to a new study out of Denmark, AI may be able to predict your political views.

A team of researchers based in Denmark and Sweden recently conducted a study to see if “deep learning techniques,” like facial recognition technology and predictive analytics can be used on faces to predict a person’s political views.

The study was entitled “Using deep learning to predict ideology from facial photographs: expressions, beauty, and extra-facial information” and published as an open access article in March 2023.

The Methodology

Tfigure 5he researchers used a public dataset of 3,233 images of Danish political candidates who ran for local office and cropped them to only show their faces (see example image to the left).

After that, they applied advanced techniques to assess their facial expressions and a facial beauty database to determine a person’s “beauty score.”

Using these data points, the scientists predicted whether the figures pictured were left-wing or right-wing.

According to Business Insider, “The study found that the tech accurately predicted the political affiliations 61% of time.

The model predicted that conservative candidates  “appeared happier than their left-wing counterparts” because of their smiles, whereas liberal candidates were more neutral.

Women who expressed contempt — a facial expression characterized by neutral eyes and one corner of the lips lifted — were linked to more liberal politics by the model.”

In addition, the researchers found that AI correlated the political candidate’s level of attractiveness with their politics.

Women deemed attractive by their beauty scores were predicted to have conservative views, though there was not a similar correlation between mens’ level of attractiveness and right-wing leanings.

The study’s writers say the results of this study, “confirmed the threat to privacy posed by deep learning approaches.”

Attractiveness and Political Ideology

Links between attractiveness and political ideology are nothing new.

One study entitled “Effect of physical attractiveness on political beliefs” examined the relationship between attractiveness and political beliefs.

As reported in the Guardian, “The researchers took data from the 1972, 1974 and 1976 American National Studies surveys which asked people to evaluate the appearance of others and also explored participants’ political beliefs, income, race, gender, and education.

These results were compared with the Wisconsin Longitudinal study which focused on the physical characteristics of more than 10,000 high school students who were rated by others on their level of attractiveness.”

The results of that study suggested that “more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican.”

Facial Recognition Technology and Political Orientation

Facial recognitionSimilar research suggests that facial recognition technology can predict a person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy.

Published in Scientific Reports one study suggests that facial recognition technology can accurately predict someone’s political stance from their Facebook profile photo.

Michal Kosinski, an associate professor at Stanford University, applied a facial recognition algorithm to 1,085,795 faces obtain from online social media profiles.

Of this dataset, 977,777 came from dating website users in the U.S., UK, and Canada who had self-reported their political orientation.

The other 108,018 faces were from Facebook users in the U.S. who also self-reported their political orientation and additionally completed a 100-item personality test.

The algorithm compared each participant’s facial features to the average facial features of liberals and conservatives. The technology used these similarity measurements to determine the likelihood that a participant was either a conservative or a liberal.

The results showed that the algorithm was able to predict political orientation alarmingly well and with similar accuracy across countries and social media platforms.

Among U.S. Facebook users, this accuracy hit 73%. Among U.S. dating website users, accuracy was 72%. Among dating website users in the UK and Canada, accuracy reached 70% and 71%, respectively.

The post Can AI Tell Your Politics By Looking At Your Face? first appeared on Humintell.

Guest Blog Post: I See What You’re Saying

By Michael Reddington, CFI. Michael is an expert at moving people from resistance to commitment. He is President of InQuasive, Inc., and author of The Disciplined Listening Method.

As a Certified Forensic Interviewer and executive resource one of my foremost goals is to uncover hidden value in all of my high-impact interactions.  These interactions may include investigative interviews, negotiations, leadership communications, and family conversations.

The hidden value I seek is often unintentionally leaked into conversations through facial expressions, behavior shifts, specific word choices, and shifts in verbal delivery.  Observing these changes as they occur can reveal what another person is thinking and feeling within the context of any conversation.

For me the goal is not to detect deception.  It is to understand what someone else is experiencing, so I can adjust my perspective and approach to help me obtain the truth or achieve my goal.

Dr. Matsumoto’s research and Humintell’s training have proved to be foundation resources for my skill development.

I first met Dr. Matsumoto at the inaugural International Association of Interviewers’ Elite Training Day.  I was captivated by his presentation and impressed by his accessibility at the event.

We occasionally kept in touch over the intervening years and over time I delved further into his research and writing. I was thrilled when he volunteered to provide feedback on the manuscript for my book, The Disciplined Listening Method, which draws heavily from his research.

As a practitioner, I’m always excited by the opportunity to talk with research scientists, learn more about their work, and gain additional insights.  I was grateful when Dr. Matsumoto agreed to be one of the first guests on my new podcast, “I See What You’re Saying”.  The sixty-minute conversation flew by and I was thankful for all of the stories and ideas he shared.

One of my favorite take aways from our conversation was Dr. Matsumoto’s focus on leveraging observations to identify someone’s mental state.  Yes, catching someone trying to deceive you can certainly be a bi-product of this approach, but it isn’t focus.  The focus is on identifying a person’s mental state by observing shifts, or changes, their communications.  I found this separation to be paramount.

I was also struck by Dr. Matsumoto’s emphasis on the importance of improving our own capacity to breathe.  Our ability to maintain our composure is a significant indicator of potential success in all our high value interactions.  It can be extremely difficult to recognize someone else’s shifting emotions, solve problems, generate agreements, or obtain the truth if we can’t control our own emotions.

Of course, it was great to hear Dr. Matsumoto talk about some of his favorite research projects.  Hearing some of the behind-the-scenes details of his studies into the emotional expressions of blind athletes was a unique opportunity.

Listening to him summarize relevant research studies from other scientists was an unexpected learning opportunity.  I had never taken the time to stop and think how quickly we react to stimulus around us and that we’re often reacting before we truly understand what we are reacting to.

Perhaps selfishly, I was also thrilled to have the opportunity to weave the topic of martial arts into our conversation. It has been well documented that people who practice martial arts experience a long list of additional and unexpected benefits.

Dr. Matsumoto’s Judo experience, culminating in his role as an Olympic Judo Coach and induction into the United States Judo Federation Hall of Fame, make him the perfect person to share some of these additional benefits.  Concepts including enhanced observation skills, problem solving skills, confidence, and an increased capacity to breathe were among those he took the time to illustrate.

Once again, thank you Dr. Matsumoto for taking the time to join the podcast and share your experience and insights.  His research, perspective, and communication approach embody the core tenants of the Disciplined Listening Method.

To hear the whole conversation please click the links below.

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Amazon Music

The post Guest Blog Post: I See What You’re Saying first appeared on Humintell.