Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

The Role of Nonverbal Communication in the Classroom

What role does nonverbal communication play in the classroom? As many children around the country head back to school, it’s important for parents and teachers to think about nonverbal communication and how it influences behavior and learning.

In the video below, Dr. Matsumoto discusses the role of nonverbal communication between teachers and students in order to create better engagement between them. For the complete interview, visit this past blog post.

Dr. Matsumoto believes teachers can think about how to structure an environment to foster a certain type of engagement. He emphasizes different types of environments give implicit messages. 

The Latest Research

Research backs up what Dr. Matsumoto suggests. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that heavily decorated classrooms can bombard students with too much visual information, interfering with their memory and ability to focus.

While teachers have good intentions when decorating, many classrooms end up being “sensory-rich” in a way that “could hamper children’s learning gains rather than help,” according to psychologists Pedro Rodrigues and Josefa Pandeirada, who co-authored the study.

7 Tips to Foster a Better Learning Environment

What are some helpful tips to improve students’ executive functions, which include skills like memory, attention, and self-regulation? Read our handy infographic below created with info from Edutopia.

The post The Role of Nonverbal Communication in the Classroom first appeared on Humintell.

Can Children Read Masked Faces?

Can Children Read Masked Faces?

As children around the country return to school, the debate whether or not children should wear masks in school continues. In addition, the issue of whether kids wearing masks delays development has become a hot-button topic for many.

Some parents believe their children are being negatively impacted. They suggest that kids are unable to read social cues or see expressions and thus, they do not want their children or anyone else wearing them.

But those who want to prevent their unvaccinated kids from contracting COVID state that developmentally, children are just fine, even when they and everyone else around them is masked.

What does the latest research say about children, mask wearing, emotion recognition and child development? Read on to learn more.

Babies and Infants

Emotion Recognition Skills in ChildrenResearch has shown that infants as young as 27 weeks old begin to recognize facial expressions of emotion. In addition, a series of studies have shown that babies between the ages of 5 to 7 months recognize facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear and surprise.

A key part of learning to communicate for a child is watching the faces, mouths, and expressions of the people closest to them. Babies and young children study faces intently, so the concern about masks covering the face is understandable. However, there are no known studies that use of a face mask negatively impacts a child’s speech and language development.

Interestingly, visually impaired children develop speech and language skills at the same rate as their peers. In fact, when one sense is taken away, the others may be heightened. Young children will use other clues provided to them to understand and learn language. They will watch gestures, hear changes in tone of voice, see eyes convey emotions, and listen to words.

Some people worry that although young infants shouldn’t wear face masks themselves, they will be subjected to developmental delays from not being able to see others’ full faces.

Yet experts say that babies and toddlers can get all the face time they need in the home with family members who aren’t wearing face masks.

By providing dedicated time to converse with your child without screens or other interruptions, children should reach their expected milestones.

READ: 4 Tips to Improve Infant Emotion Recognition Skills

Children age 3-5

While essential emotion processing is evident in infants, early childhood is considered a critical period for the development of understanding emotions and emotion processing.

In a report entitled “Masking Emotions: Face Masks Impair How We Read Emotions” researchers demonstrated that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial expressions.

Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use were significantly pronounced in children ages 3 and 5 years old.

The researchers’ findings are of essential importance; they suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotion reasoning. In addition, young children’s future social abilities should be monitored to assess the true impact of the use of masks.

One proposed solution is to design devices for personal protection that allows visibility of the lower part of the face, especially all environments important for developing social and interaction skills in children, such as in education or rehabilitation. This is especially important for children suffering from sensory or cognitive deficits.

Children age 7-13

A grid of faces showing various emotions.

In research conducted by Ashley Ruba and her team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, researchers used our own JACFEE/JACNeuF images (available here) to conduct their study.

They showed more than 80 children, ages 7 to 13, photos of faces displaying sadness, anger or fear that were unobstructed, covered by a surgical mask, or wearing sunglasses.

As reported by UWM, the kids were asked to assign an emotion to each face from a list of six labels.

The results? The kids were correct about the uncovered faces as often as 66 percent of the time, well above the odds (about 17 percent) of guessing one correct emotion from the six options.

With a mask in the way, they correctly identified sadness about 28 percent of the time, anger 27 percent of the time, and fear 18 percent of the time.

The researchers suggest if children can do better than guessing at emotions even with a mask in place, they’re likely to do even better in real-life situations. It all adds up to kids growing in their emotional capabilities, even if some of their interactions with others are happening through face coverings.

Says lead researcher Ruba:

“I hope this settles some nerves. Kids are really resilient. They’re able to adjust to the information they’re given, and it doesn’t look like wearing masks will slow down their development in this case.”

For more on how children learn about emotions, watch this lecture by Dr. Ruba below:

Tips to Communicate with Kids while Wearing a Mask

Maybe you’re in a profession where wearing a face mask is required. What are some helpful tips to better communicate with children while wearing a face mask?

The American Academy of Pediatrics has some helpful tips to be a better communicator:

The post Can Children Read Masked Faces? first appeared on Humintell.

Face Masks Reduce Emotion Recognition Accuracy

masks and emotion recognition For many, face masks have become the symbol of the global fight against COVID-19. But while face masks’ medical benefits seem to be clear, little is known about their psychological consequences, particularly on emotion recognition.

Drawing on theories of the social functions of emotions and rapid trait impressions, researchers from University of Groningen in The Netherlands tested hypotheses on face masks’ effects on emotion-recognition accuracy and social judgments (perceived trustworthiness, likability, and closeness).

The Study and Results

The Dutch study consisted of 191 German adults. Participants were (without their awareness) randomly assigned toone of two conditions: In the control condition, participants saw original face stimuli; in the mask condition, target faces were covered by a prototypical face mask.

After giving active informed consent and agreeing to not download the study materials, participants provided basic demographic information. Subsequently, participants completed an emotion-recognition task and provided social judgments. They then completed measures of their mask-as-threat and mask-as-opportunity associations. The researchers also assessed participants’ preoccupation with COVID-19 and their exposure to face masks.

Their research revealed that face masks diminish people’s ability to accurately categorize an emotion expression and make target persons appear less close.

What About Kids?

The study out of The Netherlands is not the only research that has looked at this topic.

In a report entitled “Masking Emotions: Face Masks Impair How We Read Emotions” researchers demonstrated that face masks influence the human ability to infer emotions by observing facial configurations.

Specifically, a mask obstructing a face limits the ability of people of all ages to infer emotions expressed by facial features, but the difficulties associated with the mask’s use are significantly pronounced in children aged between 3 and 5 years old.

The researchers’ findings are of essential importance, as they suggest that we live in a time that may potentially affect the development of social and emotion reasoning, and young children’s future social abilities should be monitored to assess the true impact of the use of masks.

They also stress designing devices for personal protection that allows visibility of the lower part of the face may be crucial in all environments important for developing social and interaction skills in children, such as in education or rehabilitation, especially for those suffering from sensory or cognitive deficits.

You Can Still Gain Insights

While it is true that masks block faces, all is not lost. You can still gain insights into people’s emotional states. Even if someone is wearing a mask, don’t abandon the thought that we can pick up cues in the face.

For those of you who have had our training on reading facial expressions of emotion, there’s a lot of things that go on in the upper half of the face. Clearly you can’t see the mouth region, but you can still gather things in the upper face region.

What expressions can you see?

  • The wrinkling of the disgust will give you an appearance change between the eyes at the top of the nose.
  • The lifting of the upper eyelids in fear or surprise, but especially fear, is also visible.
  • You can see the brow and eye movements of surprise
  • You can also see inner corners of the brows going up in sadness or distress.

Learn How to Read Emotions on Masked Faces

Last year we launched our Masked MiX training course that will help you unmask facial expressions of emotion.

This brand new, one-of-a-kind course helps you to regain those insights about people’s emotional states.

Masked MiX will help you read facial expressions of emotion and microexpressions on masked faces, know which facial emotions are visible and which are not, and label emotions quickly and accurately on masked faces.

Learn More and Save 25% on Masked MiX with code MASKED when checking out!

The post Face Masks Reduce Emotion Recognition Accuracy first appeared on Humintell.