Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Failure at the World Cup

All triumphant athletes look alike, but do all distraught and disappointed ones?

In past blogs, we have noted frequent observations of the universal “triumphant” pose amongst victors in sports competitions, but sports reveal other universal poses as well. For instance, as David Gendelman writes for The New York Times, this summer’s World Cup helps showcase a similar “disappointed pose.”

Mr. Gendelman noticed that athlete after athlete reacted with the same pose to a missed goal: a look of shock accompanied by the perplexed raising of both arms to clutch the back of the head. If you’ve been watching the games, I’d imagine you immediately recognized it!

This inspired him to ask psychologists and other professionals about this phenomenon, such as Dr. Jessica Tracy from the University of British Columbia. Dr. Tracy emphasized that clutching the head indicated shame but also that “the constriction of the body, in the way that the player is moving his arms around his head, almost to make himself smaller. Those are very classical shame display elements.”

She went on to describe the gesture as conveying a message of failure to fellow teammates: “I get it and I’m sorry, therefore you don’t have to kick me out of the group, you don’t have to kill me.”

Dr. Tracy actually published similar findings with Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto in their 2008 study of blind Olympians. Through this research, they found that athletes exhibited both triumphant and shameful expressions upon victory or defeat. While we have focused on the triumphant poses in other blogs, the universality of shameful expressions across blind and sighted athletes of different cultures suggests a poignant universality to these gestures as well.

Other psychologists situated this gesture deeper in our evolutionary history, which shouldn’t be surprising to followers of this blog. Dr. Dacher Keltner, of the University of California, Berkeley, sees this gesture as rooted in defense of one’s head: “The oldest kind of behavioral intention in that class of behaviors is to protect your head from blows.”

This observation certainly fits with the idea that triumphant and shameful gestures serve as a sort of message to others in the group. This connects to research presented in a past blog that sees universal emotions as rooted in their function as a form of social communication.

Dr. Keltner’s point is further supported by the fact that many fellow athletes, as well as their fans, will mimic the same gesture upon watching the game. There is a strong group component here. Not only is the gesture universal, but it is also something taken up by those who empathize with and share the emotion.

The World Cup serves as a great source of entertainment and as a showcase of athletic prowess, but it also reveals a lot about human psychology. Like the Olympics, the cross-cultural nature of such an international event lets us see what is deeply common about the psychologies of people across cultures.

This is just a start however, as Humintell has focused on how deeply these cultural similarities (and differences) impact our ability to read people and understand their diverse perspectives.

Expressing Control or Displaying Expression?

When understanding how other cultures express emotions, it is almost as important to reflect on our own cultural norms as it is to recognize differing ones.

This is essentially what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and his team find in a recent publication. Dr. Matsumoto studied the role that one’s own cultural norms and sense of emotional regulation have in evaluating the expressions of other people. Excitingly, they found a close link between our cultural norms of emotional displays and our own sense of emotional regulation, as they relate to evaluations of other people’s emotional states.

Their study sought to address the challenges in recognizing the often muted expressions of those from more subdued emotional cultures, but it also hoped to disentangle the perceiver’s own expectations and judgments from their evaluations.

In order to accomplish these aims, Dr. Matsumoto and his team conducted two studies. Both of these asking participants to identify the expression displayed in a series of images of faces, in addition to rating the intensity of the expression. Notably, the judges were split between English speakers raised in the United States and native-born Japanese participants, and the pictures included both American and Japanese faces.

In the first of these studies, judges were also asked to report their own emotional state’s intensity while judging images of faces, and they completed a measure intended to capture “cultural display rules” or the extent to which a culture encourages intense emotional expressions.

They found that cultural differences accounted for significant variations in how the judges evaluated the intensity of expressions, with Japanese judges tending to infer that an expression showcased more emotion than American judges.

The second study built on this work by replicating the same experiment only this time asking judges to evaluate their own emotional responsiveness. Dr. Matsumoto connects this to cultural display rules, because both have to do with the “management and modification of emotional expressions and reactions.”

After being shown expressive images, the judges would again make judgments as to the intensity of the emotion displayed, but this time they would also complete self-reported measures of emotional regulation. The results suggested that emotional regulation was at least as strong in mediating judgments as cultural norms.

The fact that cultural display norms and one’s own emotional regulation both mediate our perception of others’ emotions has profound implications for anyone attempting to better learn to read people. It is not enough for us to learn other people’s cultures, but we also have to critically reflect on our own norms, both personal and cultural.

This makes the process of emotional recognition just that much harder, which is why Humintell is trying to help by training you in the skill of reading people and understanding cultural differences.

Out of the Corner of Your Eye

The role of peripheral vision in emotional recognition is crucial to our perception of the world.

This is the conclusion of exciting research by Dr. Fraser Smith of the University of East Anglia. Dr. Smith and his team looked at the ways in which our peripheral vision manages to capture expressions of fear, tying this with central questions related to the evolution of emotional recognition and basic emotions.

In an admittedly small study of fourteen participants, researchers displayed images of various emotions from either directly in front of faces to orientations to the left or right of their face. These images contained a baseline neutral expression as well as images of people demonstrating six basic emotions, and participants were asked to identify the emotion shown.

This set up was intended to see if participants were able to first detect an emotion and then recognize which one it was. Interestingly, there were significant differences between each emotion. Fear was easily detected but less easily recognized, while happiness and surprise were generally well identified.

Moreover, they found that rates of recognition differed significantly when images were moved to peripheral vision. The authors emphasized the implications for individuals who struggle to recognize emotions, such as autism, as this research seeks to better understand those relevant neurological pathways.

Dr. Smith summarized how the paper importantly related to social interactions, stating “We show that it is not just being able to recognise expressions that is important, but being able to detect them in the first place. This gives us a different picture of which underlying systems may be impaired, which has potential implications for treatment of conditions where perception of emotions is affected.”

Moreover, this research furthers our understanding of the evolutionary roots of emotions and emotional recognition. For instance, in a past blog we outlined how our subtle emotional processes creates a type of emotional “landscape.” This is the result of us synthesizing impressions of emotions, such as fear and disgust, and creating a general map of the world as it relates to those emotions.

These sorts of landscapes are fundamental in allowing us to navigate the world around us and are present in many animals besides humans. Similarly, the very notion of universal emotions can be seen as tied into our evolutionary experience with the world around us, and they are certainly shared by many apes and other non-human animals.

Dr. Smith’s research helps tap into these fundamental questions, in addition to questions of social interaction. If we implicitly recognize certain emotions and identify others, our brain is doing some very focused work based on that emotion, and this is likely rooted in the evolutionary importance of each emotion.

Similarly, it is not possible to separate these evolutionary questions from those relevant to social interaction, as Dr. Smith emphasized the fundamental nature of social interaction to our daily lives.

Certainly, we are hardwired to detect and recognize emotions, but these instincts are far from perfect. This is where Humintell comes in: to harness those processes and make you better able to read people and their emotions!