Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Jan van Hooff visits chimpanzee “Mama”, 59 yrs old and very sick. Emotional meeting

Can we recognize emotions amongst other species? Can they recognize ours?

If our emotional recognition skills expand to other species besides humans, that tells us a great deal about the universality and evolutionary basis of our expressions, including our basic emotions. In this amazing video, Dr. Jan van Hooff visits an elderly chimpanzee, Mama, whom he had known many years earlier. Take a minute to watch the video and look for the moment where she recognizes the scientist’s face!

The moment of recognition is pretty hard to miss, with Mama’s face lighting up in what would be considered an obvious smile in humans. Even her vocalizations indicate pleased surprise and clear recognition. Then, her behavior changes from lethargic and apparently depressed to engaged and more active.

This seems like clear evidence that Mama is experiencing a similar process as humans do when we recognize other faces, and this would not be surprising as many emotional expressions are common across primate species. In fact, past research has found similarities between primate and human gestures.

As we previously blogged on, many gestures are common between chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans. This includes triumphant postures but also shooing gestures. Many of these are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history as well.

That fact should probably not be surprising as chimpanzees also express emotions in similar ways, with remarkably similar laughs!

So, maybe your takeaway is that by learning effective facial and emotional recognition, you can recognize not just humans but chimpanzees as well!

 

The Makings of a Lie Detector

Lie detection is tough for a lot of people, but why do some people happen to just be better at it than others?

This is an important question not just in our attempts to understand how to detect deception but also in efforts to better understand the role of emotional recognition in lie detection. A new study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin sought to disentangle various features of emotional recognition as a way of explaining variations in participants’ abilities to detect deception.

The study authors look at several variables that could explain variation in deception detection. One is “Theory of Mind” which looks at an individual’s general ability to read others’ mental states. Similarly, they looked at emotional intelligence which, while similar to Theory of Mind, focuses more on interpersonal competency and emotional recognition.

It is important to distinguish truth detection from deception detection. This should make sense intuitively, as we often get a clear intuitive sense that we are being lied to, but that doesn’t mean we always have an affirmative sense of another person’s truth-telling. Instead, we often just don’t feel lied to and conclude they are telling the truth.

They also distinguished between “high-stakes” and “low-stakes” deception, under the hypothesis that behaviors would be significantly different between the two. Namely, they note that past research has found that people tend to believe others most in low-stakes scenarios, while they become more discerning when the states get higher.

In order to explore the relationships between those topics, the study authors performed an experiment on over 100 participants. In the experiment, each participant was asked to review a series of videos of individuals speaking to high profile events, such as cases of alleged murder. Half of these were incidents of deception.

After watching each video, the participants were asked to determine who was telling the truth and who was not. Because emotional intelligence and other variables were measured by a pre-treatment series of questionnaires and tests, the researchers were able to explore statistical relationships between those emotional traits and rates of accuracy.

Overall, they did find that truth and deception detection were different as suspected, with different predictors proving significant for each. For instance, Theory of Mind accounted for much deception detection variance and emotionally intelligent participants often felt too much sympathy for liars.

This distinction seems rooted in the need for detached reasoning in detecting deception. While recognizing and understanding emotions is helpful , it often must be paired with a calculated and logical approach. This can be difficult for those with high levels of empathy, even though they tend to be good at noticing emotions like guilt.

Hopefully, this gives you some more information on what makes a good lie detector, but also come check out our new website dedicated to deception detection for more!

Landmarks in the Field of Nonverbal Behavior

We spend a great deal of time talking about Humintell’s work on nonverbal behavior, but it’s important to know that this is a wide and exciting field!

In a recent paper in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, a pair of researchers sought to map out the major authors and major papers that have dominated the field. Instead of just looking at new developments, this was an important way of seeing what the lay of the land in the field is, so to speak, and this sort of work is incredibly valuable to those trying to expand the field and to those trying to understand the academic consensus.

One of the exciting features of this research was also an analysis of the most frequently cited and published scholars in the field. We were proud to see Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto listed in the top five scholars!

In mapping the discipline, Drs. Pierrich Plusquellec and Vincent Denault leveraged a massive bibliographic database that included more than 200 million articles from thousands of journals, not limited to psychology. However, they subset this database to a series of important keywords that were relevant to nonverbal behavior and folded in citation counts to each article to determine its importance.

The first intriguing finding was a calculation of the most common words used in the titles of relevant articles. This tells us what most scholars tend to focus on and included “emotion,” “facial,” “expressions,” and “recognition.” However, these were often paired with applications including “children,” “psychiatric illness,” and “depression.”

Second, the study authors also tracked the frequency of highly cited articles over time. By looking only at the thousand most cited articles, they were able to track the development of seminal works and the emergence of increased interest in the field. They found that the field emerged during the 1960s but that most of these articles were actually quite recent.

This last finding indicates that, while the field has been developing for over 50 years, it has gained newfound emphasis and popularity recently.

These over-time findings were further explored by looking at how frequently used words over time, i.e. which words were most frequent during given decades. “Facial expression” tends to be one of the most frequent across the whole time period, though this was not so pronounced until the 1990s and 2000s.

So what exactly does this tell any of us about the field?

A main takeaway seem to be the primacy of studying facial expressions within nonverbal behavioral studies, which is notably different from looking at body language or even microexpressions more narrowly.

Another important conclusion is also the exciting nature of the current period of this field. It appears that the last 15 years have experience a sharp increase in interest, academic and otherwise, in nonverbal behavior, and we are optimistic that this trend continues!