Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Study: We Use “Baby Talk” With Our Dogs But Not Baby Faces

“Who’s so cute? Yes you are. You’re so cute, aren’t you?” Baby talk sounds pretty similar whether we’re cooing to babies or our dogs.

In fact, research has even suggested that dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans (especially women) use to talk to babies.

But an interesting new study entitled “The face behind the caring voice: A comparative study on facial prosodic features of dog-, infant- and adult-directed communication” has has spotted a crucial difference:

When baby talking to infants, our faces tend to be overly expressive—wide-open eyes, high eyebrows, and exaggerated smiles. With dogs, we’re far more stoic, researchers report in a new study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Dogs and Baby Talk

Scientists have been studying baby talk with dogs (and more recently, cats) for more than 40 years. In fact research has found similarities between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.

But little work has been done on the facial expressions that go along with the baby talk.

Anna Gergely, an evolutionary biologist and dog owner wondered whether there might be differences between how we coo to our fur babies and our human ones. So she designed a study to answer that question.

Dog Study Methodology

In the new study, Gergely and her colleagues recruited 23 Hungarian couples who had both a baby between 6 months and 18 months old and a pet dog.

While visiting the families in their homes, the researchers asked the parents to speak three short monologues individually to the dog, the baby, and the other parent.

The monologues involved things like teaching a new word, reciting a nursery rhyme, or reading a script of everyday sentences such as, “What nice weather!”

Gergely and her colleagues filmed the parents’ faces while they were speaking to their partner, pet and infant. Later, the researchers used “face-reading” software to analyze the parents’ facial expressions and muscle movements.

Dog Study Results

Gergely’s study suggested that the parents’ faces were the most intensely expressive—with more exaggerated expressions—when talking to their babies, especially when reciting the nursery rhyme and scripted sentences.

The facial expression recognition software ranked their expressions as particularly happy and often evoking surprise, Gergely says.

By contrast, participants had the least amount of facial muscle movement and the most neutral expressions when they were talking to their dogs—even though they seemed to be using a voice nearly identical to what they used with their babies.

Dr. Matsumoto’s Thoughts

Dr. Matsumoto thinks it is far fetched to suggest that humans talking to dogs know or have memorialized different meanings of faces in the animal kingdom.

Instead he suggests that there are many possible reasons why humans may be more expressive with infants than with their canine companions.

Here are a few:

1. When humans talking to infants they are even more animated, which requires additional signaling. In turn, this additional signaling recruits more behaviors, including faces. Another difference not discussed is that human – infant signaling is stronger, i.e., more intense.

2. Humans unconsciously speak animatedly for infants to learn about how to read facial expressions. This is less important for other animals.

3. Infants can verbalize many different emotional states, and can thus refer to them in their facial expressions. Infants will learn about multiple states and their links to language. This is less important and not required for animals.

What do you think about the possibilities Dr. Matsumoto outlined above? Which do you think is most plausible?

The post Study: We Use “Baby Talk” With Our Dogs But Not Baby Faces first appeared on Humintell.

How Many Types of Smiles Are There? Smiles And Their Meaning

Over the years there have been many questions about the number of smiles that exist. The truth of the matter is that that number is too vast to catalogue. Here’s why.

The first thing to remember about reading faces concerns whether they are displaying an emotion or not.

Remember, emotions are reactions to events that are meaningful to someone and that potentially impact their survival. Thus, facial expressions of emotion go on and off the face relatively quickly.

Single episodes of normal emotional expressions that are not concealed (what we call macroexpressions) go on and off the face between 0.5 and 5 seconds.

Microexpressions (signs of concealed, suppressed, or repressed thoughts and feelings) occur less than 0.5.

Both macro and microexpressions are reactions, and this is true with smiles associated with emotions as well.

LEARN HOW TO READ MICROEXPRESSIONS

Genuine Smiles

When smiles are reactions (i.e., they go on and off the face) and they occur by themselves, they are likely to be signs of enjoyment, amusement, happiness, contentment, or some other positive emotion label (thus, there are as many labels for these smiles as there are positive emotion words in culture’s language).

When they are macroexpressions, these smiles are likely to be Duchenne smiles – genuine smiles that involve not only the lip corners being pulled up and diagonally but also the muscle around the eyes (orbicularis oculi).

This muscle raises the cheeks, stretching the skin and giving it a shiny appearance, and creates crow’s feet wrinkles at the side of the eyes for many.

When the reaction smiles are microexpressions, they may not have this muscle activated because micros can involve only parts of the full-face expression.

Reaction Smiles 

When smiles are reactions and they occur with other body movements, the smiles can signal other emotions.

For example, a reaction smile with head and gaze down and a hand to the face may be signs of embarrassment, shame, or humiliation (more emotion labels).

A smile with head tilted up, gaze up, chest puffed up, and hands on the hips (arms akimbo) may be signs of pride (and other synonyms of it).

Reaction smiles that occur with other facial expressions of emotion are interesting but the analysis is the same.

If the expression (including the smile) is a reaction, then there is likely positive emotion along with the other emotional expression. Thus, when a reaction smile occurs with a reactive angry expression, a person is likely experiencing an anger-enjoyment blend.

Smiles as Secondary Emotions

Then there are reaction smiles that occur sequentially (not blended) with other emotional expressions. Oftentimes the reaction smile might occur after another emotional expression.

These are what we call secondary emotions. What are secondary emotions? They are emotions that we have about other emotions.

Some people like the fact that they get angry and so they may smile after being angry (watch out for those people). Some people like to experience fear (think sensation seekers); they may smile after showing and experiencing fear.

These secondary emotions are the reason that horror movies are popular with a segment of the population.

Social Smiles

But smiles that occur with other emotional expressions are often not reactions; instead, they are what we call social smiles.

These are smiles that typically do not include the muscle around the eye and are not signs of enjoyment, amusement, or happiness emotional reactions; they are learned, voluntary smiles (but be careful; contrary to popular belief, many people can voluntarily produce Duchenne smiles).

Importantly, social smiles are not emotions; when they occur, they can stay on the face for a long time, much longer than four or five seconds.

And people can produce them anytime because they are used in all cultures as signs of politeness, pleasantness, courtesy, etc. (more smile labels).

Social smiles grease the wheels of all societies and cultures. Sometimes they look like they may be pasted on a person’s face (remember, they’re not reactions).

Smiles that Qualify or Comment on Emotion

When social smiles occur with other emotional reactions, they qualify or comment on those other emotions.

  • A social smile with an angry expression softens the display of anger.
  • A social smile with a sad expression (aka a miserable smile) says that even though you’re sad, things will be all right.
  • A social smile with a fearful expression says the same – even though you’re afraid, things will be OK.
  • And the pasted, asymmetrical smiles (aka smirks or dominant smiles, other labels) are signs of personality (arrogance, another label).

Then there’s all the social smiles that occur in the vast number of different contexts of life, many of which have been given cute names in the past. When you think about it, these are all tied to specific contexts.

Thus, there’s the all the different types of smiles you can read about elsewhere, such as:

  • Reward smiles
  • Affiliative smiles
  • Flirtatious smiles
  • Lonely smiles
  • Dampened smiles
  • Fake smiles
  • Wistful smiles
  • Polite smiles
  • Pan Am smiles
  • Chaplin smile
  • Forced smiles
  • Uncomfortable smile
  • Sarcastic smiles
  • Love smiles
  • Interested smiles
  • Seductive smile
  • Courtship smiles
  • Dazzling smiles
  • Etc. etc.

All of these are social smiles that may include other body movements (e.g., sideways look, touching the hair with the flirtatious smile) that occur in specific contexts. And some reaction smiles of enjoyment also occur in specific contexts, such as what is known as schadenfreude (joy in someone else’s misfortunes)

Because these are all labels of smiles that occur in a specific context, it goes to reason that there are as many possible smiles to interpret and label as there are the various contexts of life.

But the smile itself is always the same – lip corners up and diagonal.

What differs is whether that particular expression in that particular context is important enough in our culture and everyday language to give it a specific label. Words and phrases are symbols that depict real life phenomena in language so that we can talk about them, and cultures and language reify or lift up specific phenomena of life that are important to those cultures for whatever reason.

Thus, there’s probably a gazillion types of smiles out there if you tie a smile with a context and want to label it. Or only two – smiles of true positive emotions and social smiles.

The post How Many Types of Smiles Are There? Smiles And Their Meaning first appeared on Humintell.

How Does Music Affect Our Emotions? A Cross-Cultural Study

Emotions from Music

Most people know the power of music and the emotions music can invoke. Listen to a happy song with an upbeat tone and you may find yourself tapping your feet. Listen to a sad song and it may bring tears to your eyes.

In fact, research has shown that music can activate our autonomic nervous system and even cause shivers down the spine.

A fascinating new study also suggests that music’s power to unify emotions and movements may have played a role in human evolution, fostering social bonds and community.

Music and Emotion Research

The recent music and emotion research study out of Turku PET Center in Finland reveals that music’s emotional impact transcends cultures, evoking similar bodily sensations around the world.

Researchers found that happy music energizes arms and legs, while sad tunes resonate in the chest.

Credit: Lauri Nummenmaa, University of Turku

The results of the study entitled “Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures” were on 25 January 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This cross-cultural study had a total of 1,500 participants who completed an online survey.

Western and Asian participants rated the emotions and bodily sensations evoked by Western and Asian songs.

The emotions and bodily sensations evoked by music were similar across Western and Asian listeners. The bodily sensations were also linked with the music-induced emotions.

“Certain acoustic features of music were associated with similar emotions in both Western and Asian listeners. Music with a clear beat was found happy and danceable while dissonance in music was associated with aggressiveness. Since these sensations are similar across different cultures, music-induced emotions are likely independent of culture and learning and based on inherited biological mechanisms,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa.

Similar to universal facial expressions of emotion, this recent musical study suggests that music’s influence on the body is universal across cultures. It also suggests people moving to music in all cultures and synchronized postures, movements and vocalizations is a universal sign for affiliation.

The researchers suggest that music may have emerged during the evolution of human species to promote social interaction and sense of community by synchronizing the bodies and emotions of the listeners.

Universal Emotions in Music

The idea that music produces universal emotional responses has been studied before.

Research led by Eline Adrianne Smit and colleagues from the MARCS Institute for Brain suggests certain elements of music are hard-wired into the human central nervous system.

Smit and colleagues asked musicians and non-musicians in Sydney, Australia as well as different communities from Papua New Guinea with varying degrees of exposure to Western music, to associate major and minor melodies with either happiness or sadness.

The researchers found that the degree of familiarity with Western music corresponded with the association between major melodies with happiness, and minor melodies with sadness.

 

 

This study suggests that familiarity through cultural exposure plays and important factor when associating major and minor melodies with happiness and sadness respectively.

Interestingly, major chords tend to appear more frequently than minor chords in popular music and research shows that humans are likely to attribute positive emotions to things that we are familiar with.

The post How Does Music Affect Our Emotions? A Cross-Cultural Study first appeared on Humintell.