Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Emotion Quotient

Do you know your emotional quotient?

Greater Kashmir reports that emotion reveals a person in public through a wide range of physical changes and facial expressions.  It is also very difficult to hide your emotions especially microexpressions that flash on and off the face in a matter of seconds.

Emotions and moods are essential to our identity and existence as humans. However, its important to also note that moods are different than emotions.

Dr. Matsumoto defines emotions as immediate, automatic, and involuntary reactions to events that are important to us. Moods, on the other hand, are states of mind that may make us more predisposed to having a certain emotional response. For example, being in an irritable mood may make a person more predisposed to becoming angry more easily.

Author Nighat Hafiz, writes that individuals run through a series of emotions with different intensities and duration.  Moods and emotion are different from temperament and personality traits but a positive correlation cannot be ruled out. A hot tempered person’s trait of aggressiveness may reflect in his flickering moods and expression of anger. A calm person with his quality of soberness may afford to keep his mood pleasant in the worst situations.

To find out more read Hafi’z opinion piece “Emotions Make Us Human“.

The Language of Language

What do people unconsciously communicate through things such as intonation, accent and phrasing?  And is it really possible to detect a lie?

Well, that is exactly what computer science professor and expert in spoken language, Julia Hirschberg, is setting out to examine.  Things to take into consideration, according to Hirschberg, “How do people convey that it’s another person’s turn to speak? What do people mean when they say ‘okay’? There are so many different ways it’s used.”

Reported on PHYSORG.COM Hirschberg is working with Barnard psychologist, Michelle Levine and Andrew Rosenberg on her current research project that was funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study deception in speech across cultures.

In 2003 Hirschberg began her work with deception in speech, which is one of the largest collections of such data partly because, as she purports, it is so difficult to collect real lies in situations where the truth is known.

“The best liars are the people who tell the truth most of the time,” said Hirschberg, who received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.  This year, she received the International Speech Communication Association’s Medal for Scientific Achievement as well as the James A. Flanagan Award for Speech and Audio Processing from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

She hopes that her research will make great strides in the fields of security such as deception detection and language development.

What are your thoughts on this type of research? Do you think it is important to be able to delineate the signs of deceptions on a regular basis, or should such research findings be kept for science and security fields?  Could such research findings possibly impede our social relationships?

Body Language and Hotel Employees

The Baltimore Sun has just reported that body language helps hotel employees interact better with customers.

In this rough economic time it is especially important for pricier hotels to employ experts to help their employees interact well with customers and ensure that they have a great experience.  Hotels are finding every way possible to ensure that their customers are kept happy in an effort to  promote return business.

One hotel chain Affinia, sought the advice of a body language expert to ensure high quality service for their customers.  Housekeeping up to maintenance were trained to spot the signs of frustration, discontent and anger.  Even hotel reservation teams can benefit from this training according to Chrissy Denihan, Affinia‘s  chief comfort officer.

The hotel industry relies heavily on good rapport.  If a person has a unpleasant experience at a hotel then they are less likely to stay at that hotel chain again especially if the cost is high.  Word of mouth can really build or ruin a hotel chain.

According to Denihan, research shows that women often respond better to face-to-face interaction whereas men prefer side-by-side communication.   Also, the biggest mistake is to talk too calmly (when someone is upset) and be too soothing,” Denihan said. “The person on the line doesn’t hear a sense of urgency to help them.”

What are your thoughts on hotel chains employing body language experts?  Do you think it will help in customer relations or have neutral effect?