Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Look Into My Eyes

In the past many studies have been conducted on children with autism and social disorders such as bipolar disorder and mood dysregulation.  It has been well documented that children with these disorders have problems identifying facial expressions of emotion but little has been know of why.

New research has discovered why children with these social disorders have difficulty in recognizing and processing facial expressions of emotions such as anger, sadness and happiness.  The findings were recently revealed at the Society for Neuroscience; and, according to the examiner.com and US News Health, they suggest that it is the lack of eye contact that triggers children’s  inability to correctly recognize faces and facial expressions.

Pilyoung Kim from the National Institute of Mental Health found that children with social disorders such as bipolar focus more on the nose and mouth region of a person’s face rather than the eyes, which is the focus of their healthy counterparts.  Kim suggests that treatment programs that get children to focus on the eyes  to identify emotions would be most beneficial.

In a previous blog “Virtual Emotions and Autism“, we reported that new technology was being developed via video games to help children with social disorders such as these to recognize facial expressions of emotion.  The ability to recognize or not recognize facial expressions of emotion affects a person’s ability to interact socially to the world around them.

“If such training helps children to process the emotional information in the world more accurately, that may in turn increase their ability to regulate their emotional reactions to social situations,” purports Kim.

The Depth of Deception

Do you ever wonder why it is so hard to tell the truth all of the time?  Why is it that we are deceptive beings?

Well, Salon.com has reported on the mechanics of deceit, the evolutionary science of deceit and how the two areas overlap.

The article focuses on Robert Trivers a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.

Via a phone interview Trivers  reveals how to define deception and how it works.  When asked the question, “When you talk about deceit and self-deception what exactly are you talking about?” Trivers responded, “Well, in verbal terms it would be lying to others and lying to yourself. But deception is much deeper because it doesn’t require language and it’s found in a whole series of other animals.

His book, The Folly of Fools reveals more than just information on typical deception.  Some of the topics covered include animal predation and people’s sex lives.

To see the rest of Triver’s interview click here.

The Evolution of Language

Humans have learned a lot about our growth as a species through the study of apes and ape culture, and now the latest scientific evidence suggests that language originated with our hands.

Scientist are now focusing on how we convey information and io9 evolution writes that how we make the sounds of language – which of course primarily happens in our voice boxes – is less important than how we convey meanings.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute purport that the gesture theory of language evolution suggests that the complex spoken languages we use today originate from relatively simple ideas our ancestors conveyed with their hands.

Their research found that all four of these species (of apes) develop a complex system of hand-waving and gestures in the first twenty months of life. These range from simply poking other apes to get their attention to slightly more abstract gestures like shaking their heads or extending their arms outward.

The fact that their young can and do pick these up shows that it is a way for them to convey meaningful information.

Researcher Michael Collins notes, “In monkeys, intentional arm movements are dedicated mainly to grasping. Communicative gestures probably emerged in apes, and began to assume grammatical forms in hominins.”

Another important fact to consider is that human babies learn the same basic gestures across cultures regardless of where they are raised.  Apes, however,  did not show common meanings for gestures across or within species.  The only commonality was that they used hand gestures in sophisticated ways from a young age.