Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Robots Read Facial Expressions?

Nowadays, robots can do almost anything- the one thing they are lacking is the ability to read facial expressions.  Well, that just might be changing.

Science has been progressing on robot’s ability to express facial expressions of emotions but recognizing them is an entirely different trial.  Researchers from the University of Tsukuba, Japan have created a method of teaching robots via facial expressions.

Young children learn about social norms and a large part of acceptable behaviors through nonverbal communication and the environment around them.  They also learn if something is accepted or rejected through simple expressions such as a smile or a frown.  Researchers are hoping to apply the same ideology to a robot and influence its actions using the very same methods.

The Verge reports that this new technology uses wireless electromyography (EMG) head band, which can accurately read smiles and frowns 97 percent of the time.

Does that sound too good to be true?

Check out the video below and decide for yourself as a scientist and a robot interact via facial expressions a frown or a smile to be exact.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are You Really Aware of Your Feelings and Emotions?

True and Interesting Fact:  The average human has about 6 thousand thoughts a day, many of which are repeating thoughts.

PsychCentral suggests that we want to be aware of what we tell ourselves so that we —rather than our emotions—direct our choices.  They also reveal that cognitive abilities do not fully develop until the mid-20′s.

So why is it so important to keep our emotions under control? Well, they say that our thoughts activate emotion driven processes within us, which includes negative as well as positives reactions.

So how can we control our feelings and emotional awareness?   The first thing to recognize is that events and people’s actions may trigger unpleasant feelings and reactions, but they do not cause them.   What causes our painful feelings is what we tell ourselves about those situations.

Our feelings are indicators, according to this article, of when we are off track in relation to where we want to be (i.e. our goals/visions).  It is important for us to be in-tune with our painful and unpleasant emotions such as anger, guilt, shame, hurt and anxiety because they provide information that pleasant emotions cannot.

Here are 6 steps to help you understand and process your emotions:

1.  Select a triggering situation to process.

2.  Identify and feel your emotions and feelings.

3.  Feel and notice the location of any sensations in your body.

4.  Accept your feelings, and be confident that you can handle the emotion(s) and sensations.

5.  Identify what you tell yourself in your mind that is triggering any painful emotions.

6.  Connect empathically to understand and validate your experience.

Smile! You’ll Look Younger

Forget Botox to make you look younger.  New research suggests that the mere act of smiling makes you look younger than you are.

NewsMaxHealth writes that the Institute for Human Development (Max Planck Institute) in Berlin has published a study, in Psychology and Aging and the journal of Emotion Cognition, that found that smiling makes people look more attractive and therefore younger.

The study included 154 German men and women of various ages.  The participants were asked to examine more than 2,000 photographs of 171 people and then estimate their age.

The study’s findings purport that, “Facial expressions had a substantial impact on accuracy and bias of age estimation.  Relative to other facial expressions, the age of neutral faces was estimated most accurately, while the age of faces displaying happy expressions was most likely underestimated.”