Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

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.

Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects

Have you ever heard of face pareidolia? This everyday phenomenon where people see faces in everyday objects is a human condition that relates to how our brains are wired. Once considered a symptom of psychosis, it arises from an error in visual perception.

According to new research led by David Alais of the University of Sydney, our brains detect and respond emotionally to these illusory faces the same way they do to real human faces.

In his paper entitled “A shared mechanism for facial expression in human faces and face pareidolia” Alais and his colleagues suggest that human brains are evolutionarily hardwired to recognize faces, with highly specialized brain regions for facial detection and processing.

The Study

According to ScienceAlert, Alais and his colleagues asked 17 volunteers to look at a series of dozens of illusory and human faces, repeated several times over, then rate the strength of emotion in each one through the same computer software.

Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects: sample faces pareidolia study
Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects

The researchers found that the study participants mostly agreed on the expressions that the pareidolia faces were showing, and that bias crept in based on the expression of the previous face – something that we do with human faces too. This also happened when real and illusory faces were mixed up.

In other words, a succession of happy faces makes us more likely to see the next one as happy as well. That this bias was observed in both real and illusory faces suggests the brain is processing them in a similar way, and using similar neural networks.

Facial Perception

Facial perception involves more than just the features common to all human faces, like the placement of the mouth, nose, and eyes. Our brains might be evolutionarily attuned to those universal patterns, but reading social information requires being able to determine if someone is happy, angry, or sad or whether they are paying attention to us.

“What we found was that actually these pareidolia images are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face,” Alais said. “You are somehow unable to totally turn off that face response and emotion response and see it as an object. It remains simultaneously an object and a face.”

Long Term Implications

Alais has been interested in this and related topics for years. For instance, in a 2016 paper published in Scientific Reports, Alais and his colleagues built on prior research involving rapid sequences of faces that demonstrated that perception of face identity, as well as attractiveness, is biased toward recently seen faces.

They designed a binary task that mimicked the selection interface in online dating websites and apps (like Tinder), in which users swipe left or right in response to whether they deem the profile pictures of potential partners attractive or unattractive. Alais et al. found that many stimulus attributes—including orientation, facial expression and attractiveness, and perceived slimness of the online dating profiles—are systematically biased toward recent past experience.

This previous study as well as the most recent one conducted may help to inform research in artificial intelligence or disorders of facial processing such as prosopagnosia.

The post Responding Emotionally to Faces on Inanimate Objects first appeared on Humintell.

4 Body Language Displays You’ll See at the Tokyo Olympics

Tokyo 2020: Olympics boss reluctant to hold Games behind closed doors

The Tokyo Olympics are a month away! The Olympic Games are set to begin Friday July 23rd and are an excellent place to observe body language and nonverbal behavior; tensions are high and emotions are always on full display.

Keep in mind no matter how many times the Olympic venues and locations change, the facial expressions on an athlete’s face do not. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat will always be signaled on the face in the same way.

What nonverbal displays can you observe at the Olympic Games? Read on to learn more…

1) Universal Facial Expressions of Emotion

The Olympics give us an opportunity to read people exhibiting unfiltered, raw emotions. With emotions as high as they are during the Games, few people would attempt to conceal their emotions, even if they weren’t so physically exhausted!

Humintell Director Dr. David Matsumoto’s experience as an Olympic Judo coach and International Judo Federation (IJF) Researcher has given him unique insight into the way Olympians express emotions.

His study entitled “Spontaneous facial expressions of emotion of congenitally and non-congenitally blind individuals” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The first of its kind, he studied congenitally blind (blind from birth) and sighted judo athletes at the 2004 Paralympic Games and the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece.

During the course of the study, more than 4,800 photographs were captured and analyzed, including images of athletes from 23 countries. According to the findings, there were “no differences between congenitally blind, non-congenitally blind, and sighted athletes, either on the level of individual facial actions or in facial emotion configurations”.

This meant that the blind and sighted athletes produced the exact same facial expression, firing the exact same muscles at exactly the same time in similar situations.

These findings provide compelling evidence that facial expressions of emotion are hardwired into our genes and are not learned culturally.

2) Duchenne Smiles

Podium Mens Judo Competition 60 Kg Men Editorial Stock Photo - Stock Image | Shutterstock

After examining photos from top competitors in the 2004 Olympic Games, Dr. Matsumoto observed that the winners almost all sported pronounced, genuine smiles.

He referred to these as the Duchenne smile, and the genuine nature of the setting showcases these as truly prototypical expressions of happiness.

These involved: “smiles that involve not only the smiling muscle that pulls the lip corners up but also the muscle around the eyes, which lifts the cheeks, narrow the eyelids and produces crow’s feet wrinkles.”

3) Displays of Triumph

Judoka Travis Stevens Wins Team USA's First-Ever Olympic Medal In His Weight Class

In addition to being an amazing showcase of emotions, the Olympics also demonstrate the unity of human emotions across cultures. Given that the Games bring athletes together from all over the world, they present a prime study in the differences and similarities between different expressions of emotions.

Dr. Matsumoto’s research has also found that, upon winning the gold, Olympic athletes almost invariably showcase the same emotion: triumph.

Interestingly, this is not traditionally included as a universal basic emotion, but all the same, Dr. Matsumoto found it again and again in pictures and videos of triumphant competitors. He noted: “When we studied pride, there was always something gnawing at me because some of the expressions that were previously labeled pride just didn’t make that much sense to me.”

Eventually, he and fellow Humintell researcher Dr. Hyi Sung Hwang labeled this emotion triumph, contending that “Triumph has its own signature expression that is immediate, automatic and universal across cultures.” Instead of the subtle, self-satisfied smile that marks pride, triumph is displayed in a jubilant, almost aggressive fashion.

Interestingly, this emotion holds even in cultures where dominance and triumph are generally deemphasized in favor of humility, and it can be seen amongst non-human primates and even other animals as well. This all suggests a deep evolutionary and biological root behind the emotion of triumph, which we have also noted with other emotions.

Moreover, its manifestation is not just limited to a facial expression. Triumph is often accompanied by a sort of “victory stance,” with arms raised and head held up high. This holds for victors from all over the world, emphasizing past research that found similarities in gestures universally across cultures.

4) The Face Cover

We often see athletes and individuals in high stress, emotional situations do what Dr. Matsumoto calls a “face cover”.

But why exactly do people cover their face in emotional and stressful times?

Some individuals believe that the face cover is only a part of social communication, but Dr. Matsumoto believes that it is not. He believes that individuals often cover their face to conceal their emotions and that it is an immediate reaction that most people cannot control.

Dr. Matsumoto also suggests that covering one’s face could also have some evolutionary basis, rooted in not letting enemies see your emotions because it could potentially be a danger to your well-being. Nonetheless, this gesture is immediate and unconscious.

Keep your eye out for this behavior and you’ll surprisingly see it fairly frequently (you may even catch yourself doing it!)

The post 4 Body Language Displays You’ll See at the Tokyo Olympics first appeared on Humintell.