Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Past Blog: Emotions in Gift Giving


The holidays are right around the corner: can you tell if someone likes their gift just by reading their facial expressions?

In light of this holiday season, the University of Hertfordshire has conducted a study on gift giving. The focus of this study was determining whether or not gift givers could tell whether or not a recipient liked a present just by looking at their facial expressions and nonverbal behavior.

Dr. Karen Pine, a Professor of Developmental Psychology, led the study of 680 men and women in the process of giving and receiving gifts.

Three quarters of the participants were able to correctly identify whether or not a recipient of one of their gifts truly liked it. According to Dr. Pine, “People always try and say the right things, there’s a lot of social pressure to say the right things and to give the impression that we do like a present and our words tend to be quite positive, but the real feelings tend to leak out in our non-verbal behaviour.”

What do you say when you receive a gift you are not too fond of?

Eye contact, or lack thereof, is one easily spotted sign that the recipient did not like their present. They try to avoid eye contact with the giver in case the expression on their face gives away their true feelings. The expression on a displeased recipient’s face is often a ‘social smile,’ which involves only the mouth muscles. When someone is truly happy about something, they smile with both their eyes and their mouth; what is often called a Duchenne smile.

In terms of the gift itself, the recipient tends to rewrap it and put it out of sight fairly quickly if they do not like it. Contrastingly, if someone really likes a gift, they hold it up like a trophy, passing it around and showing it off. They also tend to hold on to the present for a little longer. If it’s a scarf that they really like, for example, the recipient may stroke it for awhile, or even put it on.

However, a negative nonverbal response is not necessarily indicative of someone being unappreciative of a gift. Perhaps what they have received isn’t quite what they were hoping for, but they could still be appreciative of the gesture. Isn’t that what is important?

Dr. Pine told BBC News that she believes we need “to go back to the old values about what a gift is really for; it is a token of appreciation or affection for a person.” However, by conducting this study, she is putting emphasis on reactions towards the gifted items themselves, rather than the meaning behind them.

What are your thoughts? Are you able to tell when a gift you have given is not well received? You may read more about the study here.

Eye Contact: How Long Is Too Long?

Blue Eye- Eye Contact Myth- HumintellWritten by Melinda Wenner Moyer for Scientific American

There’s a reason your mother told you to look people in the eye when you talk to them: eye contact conveys important social cues. Yet when someone holds your gaze for more than a few seconds, the experience can take on a different tenor. New work elucidates the factors that affect whether we like or loathe locking eyes for a lengthy period.

Researchers have long known that eye contact is an important social signal. Our recognition of its import may even be hardwired. One study found that five-day-old babies prefer looking at faces that make direct eye contact compared with faces that have an averted gaze. “Eye contact provides some of the strongest information during a social interaction,” explains James Wirth, a social psychologist now at Ohio State University at Newark, because it conveys details about emotions and intentions. (Lack of eye contact is one of the early signs of autism in infants and toddlers.) The power of eye contact is so great that, according to a 2010 study co-authored by Wirth, if someone avoids your gaze for even a short period, you may feel ostracized.

But what determines how we feel about prolonged eye contact? One recent study explored this question. In research presented in May 2015 at the Vision Sciences Society conference, psychologist Alan Johnston and his colleagues at University College London collected information from more than 400 volunteers about their personalities. Then the subjects indicated their comfort level while watching video clips of actors who appeared to be looking directly at them for varying lengths of time.

Johnston and his colleagues found that, on average, the subjects liked the actors to make eye contact with them for 3.2 seconds, but the subjects were comfortable with a longer duration if they felt the actors looked trustworthy as opposed to threatening. “Gaze conveys that you are an object of interest, and interest is linked to intention,” Johnston explains—so if someone appears threatening and holds your gaze, that could indicate that the person has bad intentions. This idea could help explain findings from a controversial study published in 2013, which reported that people are more likely to change their views on a political issue when they are being challenged by people who do not make eye contact with them. If the challengers had made eye contact, they might have seemed more threatening and less trustworthy.

Our reaction to prolonged eye contact may relate to how we perceive ourselves, too. Johnston and his colleagues found that the more cooperative and warm subjects believed themselves to be, the longer they liked eye contact to be held. Johnston speculates that the more socially comfortable a person feels, the more he or she may “enjoy the intimacy of mutual gaze.”

For more on eye contact and detecting deception, view this past blog.

In Texting, Punctuation Conveys Different Emotions. Period.

By Christina Passariello for the WSJ

texting-girlsTechnology is changing language, period

The use of a period in text messages conveys insincerity, annoyance and abruptness, according to a new study from the State University of New York Binghamton. Omitting better communicates the conversational tone of a text message, the study says.

As with any study by university researchers, though, it’s not that simple. The study found that some punctuation expresses sincerity. An exclamation point is viewed as the most sincere. (I overuse exclamation points!)

“It’s not simply that including punctuation implies a lack of sincerity,” said the study’s lead author, Celia Klin, an associate professor of psychology at Binghamton. “There’s something specific about the use of the period.”

The study asked 126 undergrads to evaluate conversations that appeared as text messages and handwritten notes (who uses those anymore?). The exchange started with an invitation, such as, “Dave gave me his extra tickets. Wanna come?” The students were asked to react to one-word responses – “Okay, Sure, Yeah, Yup” – with or without a period.

Grammar is evolving as we use new communication tools. Ms. Klin said she suspects periods in email to be more acceptable than in text messages, for example, because email is less conversational. Text messages are often short one-word replies, she said.

“The rapid exchange of text messaging gives it a speech-like quality,” said Ms. Klin. “It makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them — emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”

Ms. Klin’s study, “Texting insincerely: the role of the period in text messaging,” appeared in the journal Computers in Human Behavior last month.