Social Engineering Blogs

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Left is Best When it Comes to Basic Emotions

Many of us judge a person’s emotional state by their Facial Expressions.  Whether we do this consciously or not facial expressions of emotion are a big part of nonverbal communication.

The old idiom “Put your best Foot forward” might now apply to your face.  Soon we might be saying “Put your best Side forward“, according to new research, led by Kelsey Blackburn and James Schirillo from Wake Forest University.

Forbes.com reported on a their study that our left cheek shows a greater range of emotion than the right, which observers rate as more pleasing to the eye.

The study’s participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of both sides of male and female faces on gray-scale photographs.  Participants were shown both original photographs and mirror-reversed images, so that an original right-cheek image appeared to be a left-cheek image and vice versa.

An interesting fact is that the study, which is soon to be published in the Journal of Experimental Brain Research, found a strong preference for left-sided portraits, regardless of whether the pictures were originally taken of the left side or mirror-reversed. This preference was not gender specific either.

A good question to ask or clarify is, Are there real psychical differences between the left an right side of human faces or is it just our perception that makes the left side is the best side?

“Our results suggest that posers’ left cheeks tend to exhibit a greater intensity of emotion, which observers find more aesthetically pleasing. Our findings provide support for a number of concepts – the notions of lateralized emotion and right hemispheric dominance with the right side of the brain controlling the left side of the face during emotional expression,” stated researchers.

 What do you think of the study’s results? 
Do you have any questions that can be raised for future studies?

How to Use Emotional Intelligence for Marketing

The marketing era of Social Media has not only arrived but is in Full Force!  Companies now depend on social media to fully market their products to the world at large.

The question is NOT should a company devote time, therefore money, to up-keeping social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, iContact, LinkedIn etc; the question is, is a company’s social media marketing as effective as it could be?

 How do companies effectively use sites like FaceBook and Twitter?

According to Ad Age Digital and Jonah Peretti, CEO of Buzzfeed a company needs to understand the emotional connections people have for social media sites and how those emotional reactions effect consumer behaviors.

“Understanding the social web doesn’t mean [just] being smart. Too often we’ll sit in a conference room and brainstorm the smartest strategy and try to find the smartest person to figure out how to get stuff to work on Facebook and Twitter,”  says Peretti

He went on to note that you need not just intelligence, but emotional intelligence to succeed in social media marketing.

Being smart” about social media is, “looking at a piece of content and saying, ‘If I saw this on my Facebook wall would I click it, would I have an emotion, would I want to share it with other people.”

Asking the question of whether this will create an emotion in a consumer is very important because it is those  emotions the call to action our and we will click on the things that  catch our attention but the things that stir an emotion within us we not only will click on but will share as well.

So the answer to the question above:

Make your post, tweet or side bar ad illicit an emotional reaction in your target audience
Ensure that, that emotion will lead to your product or event being shared

 ”There is a big difference, depending on the platform, on what contributes to what spreads [via social sites] and emotional intelligence is key to succeeding at social media.”
 
Ad Age Digital Media Conference 2012 – watch a short video on Social Media Marketing.

On a similar note there is a New App, the “Smurk“,  that claims to be able to help companies gauge the collective mood of a crowd.

MrWeb.com has reported that users will be able to stretch and scrunch he Smurk’s face to the exact expression they are feeling and share those feelings via text, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.  This app’s information can then be applied to any place, event, or product.

Do you click on share links, or likes for FaceBook?

What are some of your ideas for helping Humintell in sharing our blogs with others via these social outlets?

Does Anxiety Exist to Protect Us Against Potential Threats?

Recent research published online in the journal Chemosensory Perception suggests that anxious men have a heightened sense of smell, presumably to detect predators or disease-carriers.

The study entitled Enhanced Olfactory Sensory Perception of Threat in Anxiety: An Event-Related fMRI Study tested 14 mens’ perception of odors, including bad ones.  In some trials, the men were in an MRI scanner, and odors were faint.

According to Scientific American, participants were simply asked if they could detect a scent, yes or no.  In addition, the subjects were also tested for anxiety: their breathing and skin electrical conductivity were measured, as in a lie detector.

The results?  More anxious men were significantly better at detecting lower concentrations of scents, particularly nasty ones. This suggests that anxiety evolved as an evolutionary trait to protect humans from predators.

What do you think about the results of this study? Do you think the findings make logical sense?

You can listen to the complete podcast from Scientific American here.