Social Engineering Blogs

Humintell’s director Dr. David Matsumoto not only did the original research (along with other researchers including Dr. Ekman) for microexpression recognition training tools, but he continues his research into emotions and culture today.

Below is an interview with Dr. Matsumoto about his current research on Triumph vs. Pride by science reporter Anna Meldolesi for her Italian Newspaper, Il Corriere della sera.

So, what does Dr. Matsumoto have to say about Emotions, Triumph and Pride?

Q1: From media articles announcing the paper in press in Evolution and Human Behavior, I understand that triumph comes first, pride second. Triumph is an instant reaction to winning.  By making the winner appear larger and more fearsome, triumph cements social dominance and advertises victory.  Is it correct? 

Can you please describe some situation where a chimp would exhibit the same behavior? Do non-human primates sometimes exhibit also pride?

Dr. Matsumoto:  Yes that is correct in terms of what we believe and state in the paper.  I do believe the literature has examples of the same kind of behavior in chimps, and in fact “triumph behaviors” are noted throughout the animal kingdom, although in different ways.   I do believe there is some evidence for nonhuman primates to exhibit pride, but I am not familiar with that literature. But some of that literature conflates what we know about pride with our findings on triumph.

For example see the video below:  

Click here to view the embedded video.

  What do you think about Dr. Matsumoto’s comment?
What about the video?  Share your comments with the Humintell Community!

Marco Gillies of GoldSmith college was spurred into launching a new computer gaming project that works with actors because he thinks that “games shouldn’t be designed by programming experts, but by experts in movement.”

Programming companies have already successfully aimed at creating gaming characters with realistic-looking movements.  However, Gillies and his colleagues are developing characters that can recognize subtle movements and express them in a very natural way.

This system will hopefully be the first truly interactive gaming system of its kind with the algorithm’s ability to react to social behaviors and subtle body movements.

 ”Writing software to recognise complex and subtle movements like human body language is notoriously difficult.  We are taking a different approach, which allows people to design movement interfaces directly by moving,” Gillies told Wired.co.uk.

The project works with actors attached to motion sensors that are tracked by Kinect cameras to create natural movements via a machine learning algorithm program that tracks their movements.

Gillies goes on to comment that, “Actors understand movement implicitly in their bodies, they understand movement by moving.  It would be almost impossible to turn that kind of implicit understanding into rules that we can explicitly program into some software.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

After testing their system using non-thespian gamers, they found that within three hours the subjects had begun designing simple games based on their body movements.

What do you think about being the designer of your own game ?  
What are other applications of such technology?