Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

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.”

Blood Pressure and Emotional Cues

Now there is another reason to keep that blood pressure in check.  New research suggests that high blood pressure can lead to an inability to recognize and process emotions especially happiness, sadness, anger and fear.

A recent study conducted by Clemson University psychology professor James A. McCubbin and colleagues has shown that people with higher blood pressure have reduced ability to recognize certain emotions in others.

This can prove difficult in situations where reading other’s facial expressions are crucial such as at work or in meetings.

“Emotional Dampening”  as McCubbin has dubbed it, causes individuals to  respond inappropriately to anger or other emotions in others.

McCubbin believes that the link between dampening of emotions and blood pressure is its involvement  in the development of hypertension and risk for coronary heart disease, the biggest killer of both men and women in the U.S.

An interesting finding of this study is that McCubbin’s theory of emotional dampening applies to positive emotions as well.  “If you have emotional dampening, you may distrust others because you cannot read emotional meaning in their face or their verbal communications,” he said. “You may even take more risks because you cannot fully appraise threats in the environment.”

Do you think this preliminary research needs to be ongoing before making such conclusions? Or Do you fully agree perhaps because you know someone or are that someone who has high blood pressure and who shows signs of  “emotional dampening”?

TELL Me How you Feel

According to NewsWise and the American Institute of Physics a research team at the University of Florida, Gainesville is expanding lie detection  capabilities and moving away from the old way of the polygraph, which was not always reliable, to the updated way of voice stress analysis.

The researchers confirmed that the human voice does in fact change in systematic ways under carefully measured stress tests.  Their findings, “Talker and gender effects in induced, simulated, and perceived stress in speech,”  will be presented Wednesday morning, Nov. 2.

“The results were a surprise. We had expected that higher stressors would prompt both increased physiological response and increased self-reported stress levels in all test subjects fairly uniformly for both men and women,” Dr. Harnsberge, a speech scientist in the Department of Linguistics, explains.  However, the research revealed hat men and women respond quite differently to the same stressors.

This type of research holds promise for the future by improving speech analysis systems such as lie detectors and computerized voice recognition.