Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Alcohol and Emotion Recognition

We all know that alcohol has profound neurological impacts, but what is its role in emotion recognition?

According to a new study by Dr. Lauren Hoffman and a team of researchers, alcohol use can significantly impair our abilities to recognize crucial emotions in other people, especially anger. Dr. Hoffman found that recovering alcoholics, while generally able to make out facial features, were much worse at recognizing emotions like anger than the control.

There is some theoretical justification for expecting these results. Emotion recognition requires a series of complicated neurological processes, many of which are the same processes that are suppressed or distorted from long-term alcohol use.

In order to conduct this investigation, Dr. Hoffman’s team gathered 73 volunteers, divided between non-users and those undergoing inpatient treatment for their alcohol use disorder. The latter group was comprised of former alcoholics who had ceased use for approximately three months.

This focus on recovering alcoholics would not only shed a light on the effects of alcohol but also showcases the long-term impact of alcohol use on people’s brains.

The participants were asked to complete two recognition tasks. First, they were shown a series of images with neutral faces, divided between male and female. The goal here was to rule out whether alcohol use disorder had degraded the ability to distinguish physical features such as these. There did not prove to be any difference between treatment and control groups, helping to rule out this possibility.

Additionally, participants were exposed to a series of faces divided between four expressions: neutral, happy, angry, and sad. They were asked to determine which expression was being conveyed, being prompted with choices such as “happy or sad.”

Consistently, those recovering from alcohol use disorder were less able to identify the emotions portrayed than the control group. This was especially true for faces that displayed anger.

Interestingly, such failures to effectively identify angry faces were also deeply correlated with self-reported measures of interpersonal problems.

Not only did this study help shed light on the role of alcoholism in emotion recognition, but it also helped shed further light on the cognitive underpinnings behind our ability to recognize emotions. We already know that this is generally a learned skill, but apparently it is also a skill that can be subjected to disrepair.

What is perhaps most interesting is the connection between alcoholism, interpersonal problems, and an inability to recognize anger. This suggests distinctive cognitive mechanisms for various emotions!

So, it goes without saying that not drinking excessively will help you learn emotion recognition, but so will taking one of Humintell’s exciting training courses!

Learning in Unlikely Faces

The facial expressions of a kombucha drinking social media poster might not be a national headline, but they serve a great example for learning about facial expressions.

As the New York Times reports, an online video by Brittany Tomlinson went viral after she showed a wide range of emotions upon trying some kombucha. In the video, Tomlinson tries her kombucha and proceeds to experience an apparent whirlwind of emotions: wincing, shaking her head, giggling, and smirking.

The verdict? “Low-key it’s kind of good, but it’s nasty,” she clarified.

So, why is this important if you are not contemplating trying kombucha yourself? In fact, the video contained in the Times article shows Tomlinson showcasing a rapid succession of easily identifiable facial expressions.

Dr. David Matsumoto was called in to comment on the exceptional nature of this video. While these cycles of expressions “go on all the time,” he said “you’re watching the person’s mind process in real time, which is really cool.”

Specifically, its “really cool,” because even laypeople can recognize emotions in her faces.

The University of California, Berkeley’s Dr. Dacher Keltner also agreed, calling this “an amazing sequence” which allowed “easy to see” facial expressions.

According to Keltner, Tomlinson showed five to seven clearly different emotions. Disgust is of course clearly available, but what else are you recognizing? Please don’t hesitate to sound off in the comments!

If you’re struggling, this article helps by breaking down the video frame by frame!

Why is that Funny?

Psychology often tries to unravel emotional mysteries, but some resist investigation more than others.

One of these long-standing mysteries is the reality of humor. What exactly makes a joke funny or not? And to whom? It is this question which has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers, and Scientific American’s Giovanni Sabato attempts to trace the history of theory and research on humor in a recent article.

Sabato delves into a long philosophical tradition, including the likes of Plato and Sigmund Freud, which has sought to model how humor works. While Plato and other ancient Greeks theorized that humor resulted from a sense of superiority over the failings of others, Freud made a great deal about the tendency for humor to thrive on the violation of taboos.

Another theory has focused on the idea of “incongruity.” Humor is derived from the subversion of expectations or the incompatibility of various concepts or situations. This helps explain the presence of double meanings and puns in humor, and it showcases the frequency with which humor deals with unexpected punchlines or resolutions to tricky situations.

The latter should be pretty intuitive to anyone who has watched a sitcom!

One more modern attempt to develop a unified theory of humor has built on that idea of incongruity. Drs. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, have introduced the idea of “benign violation.”

This theory focuses on humor being derived from violations of expectations surrounding norms. When somebody acts in a way that they are not supposed to, if it does not result in indignation or scandal, the situation will often be perceived as humorous.

There is also a role here for being distant from that particular, often awkward, violation. By hearing these stories second-hand from a comedian or friend, we have enough distance to find these situations funny.

However, this theory of distance and violation is not the only popular theory. Some psychologists and evolutionary biologists simply see humor as an evolutionary mechanism. Spontaneous and genuine laughter is deeply ingrained in our biology, while contrived and forced laughter developed as a way of smoothing social situations.

One way that humor can be derived from our hard-wired evolutionary experiences is related to the subversion of expectations. A group of philosophers, including Matthew Hurley of Indiana University Bloomington, saw humor as related to mistakes, or at least to their detection.

Our mind naturally assumes that it knows what will happen, relying on heuristics to predict likely events, but when things don’t happen as they should, for instance when another person acts erratically, we interpret that as humor.

None of these are necessarily perfect explanations for such a complex phenomenon. However, they help situate the question of humor into our cognitive and evolutionary history. From past blogs, we already know that emotional expressions are deeply rooted in evolution, and we know that properly reading people often depends on situating our experiences into these cognitive roots.