Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Understanding through Gesture

Language has a huge influence in determining how we interact with the world, but what about nonverbal behavior?

When we speak and conceptualize the world in certain ways, we also structure our experience in order to make sense of and interact with it. In a novel 2017 study, Dr. Elizabeth Kirk and Dr. Carine Lewis sought to explore the connection between non-verbal gestures and creative problem-solving in children as a way of exploring the role that nonverbal gestures play in understanding the world.

The authors hypothesized that children’s ability to develop creative uses for everyday items depended on their capacity to freely gesture about those objects. This would allow the children to engage with these objects nonverbally in a way that allowed them to better understand their potential uses.

In the first of two experiments, a group of children between age 9 and 11 were exposed to a series of images and encouraged to develop a list of novel uses for the objects depicted in those images. Some of the children were allowed to gesticulate freely as they spoke, while another had their hands secured by Velcro and were instructed to keep their hands still.

After monitoring the experiment, the authors categorized gestures based on several criteria, such as whether they depicted the use of an object or described its spatial dimensions. This was part of an effort to make sense of which gestures had a “semantic meaning” in expressing certain thoughts, and these gestures were dubbed “iconic gestures.”

In a separate experiment, another group of children were exposed to the same set of object images, with some being encouraged actively to gesture. While, when allowed, almost all children naturally gestured, those that were encouraged to did so even more, developing a correspondingly greater number of novel uses for the objects.

In both cases, the study authors found that the ability to freely gesture helped the children develop new ideas. Interestingly, the type of object did not determine how many gestures the children would make, but they did influence the types of gestures.

Dr. Kirk and Dr. Lewis concluded that gestures do help stimulate creativity in children. They contended that, by gesturing, children were better able to understand important features of the objects and determine how best to act on this knowledge.

This research fits well into the assumption that gestures help us structure our world. This underscores how important nonverbal behavior is in understanding both the world around us and the other people we encounter within it.

Previous blogs have explored how certain gestures seem universal across cultures and the importance of nonverbal behavior in face to face interaction. For those who are curious to learn more, Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto leads a fantastic webinar on the role of gestures in interpersonal communication!

Searching for Universal Gestures

If there are universal emotions and expressions, does that mean there are universal gestures?

This is exactly what Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyisung C. Hwang sought to answer in a 2012 study which sought to conduct a groundbreaking and comprehensive analysis on international differences in gestures.

In order to answer this, they compiled a list of verbal expressions, such as “good luck”, that would be relevant to many cultures and brought people from around the world to examine this list. These individuals then sought to derive a series of gestures, otherwise known as emblems, from this list in order to compare and contrast them between cultures.

But why had such a fascinating question not been suitably investigated? This is partially because their question is a difficult one to answer as many gestures or nonverbal behaviors are culturally specific and drawn from traditional historical contexts. For example, the common Western sign of “good luck” with crossed fingers is derived from older Christian traditions. Thus, the etymology of many gestures becomes complicated to trace.

After examining a wide variety of cultural gestures as identified and performed by representatives of those cultures, Dr. Matsumoto and Dr. Hwang managed to derive a series of loose categories with which to conceptualize cultural similarities and differences.

One of these categories were evaluative gestures, like the Western “thumbs up” but other categories conveyed more nuanced social norms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, gestures fitting into the category of insults seemed to be quite common across many cultures. Other categories included the act of indicating something or of articulating inner physical or mental states, such as being in pain.

Overall, while many gestures were the same across cultures, some similar gestures had radically different meanings depending on where they were used. Moreover, certain gestures appeared to be culturally unique and had no correlates in other cultures, such as South Asian gestures for apology or East Asian messages concerning hunger.

The most consistently universal of these gestures sought to convey very basic messages that tied to universal physical forms. For instance, this manifested in common insults that referred to gross parts of the human body. Most cultures associate human excrement with disgust, so tying this to obscene gestures seems intuitive. Moreover, it would connect profoundly with evidence that ties basic emotions to facial expressions.

As the study authors concluded, this is not the end of a search for universally similar or different gestures. Instead, it was an attempt to reach across cultures and derive categories that can be helpful in both everyday understanding and for future research.

For more information on the role of nonverbal communication across cultures and basic emotions, check out our past few blogs here and here!

Universal Basic Microexpressions?

As a follower of this blog, you are probably pretty aware of universal emotions, but how do these relate to microexpressions?

Some psychologists see microexpressions as undermining the case for basic emotions, but 2014 research conducted by Humintell’s Dr. David Matsumoto and Dr. Hyisung C. Hwang works to refute this misconception. By generating images showcasing subtle variations of basic emotions, they were able to demonstrate that study participants could consistently identify them as a given basic emotion.

This blog has discussed the notion of universal basic emotions at length, but this study asked whether more subtle facial expressions, such as microexpressions, are also reducible to basic emotional expressions or can showcase other distinctive expressions.

Such an investigation needed a precise definition of microexpressions as they relate to prototypical, universal expressions. While most of you know that a microexpression is a type of subtle expression, the study authors defined them as “low-intensity versions of full-face” expressions or as presenting the expression only in certain parts of the face, like the eyes, nose, or mouth.

In order to test this phenomenon, they derived certain facial features from universal expressions which were considered crucial to the recognition of that emotion. Then, they took faces that demonstrated basic emotions and modified them to only show some of those features.

These images were then displayed to a series of university students who were asked to examine images of those emotions which alternated between a face giving a neutral expression, a quick, one second image of that face with a subtle emotion, and then the neutral expression again. Participants were asked to identify the emotion being displayed.

Perhaps surprisingly, they found that the participants were pretty accurate in identifying the expressions, with an average 59 percent success rate across each emotion! While this may make you think that reading microexpressions is just something easy that everyone can do, this conclusion would misrepresent Dr. Matsumoto’s and Dr. Hwang’s findings.

Many of these images were derived as direct correlates of the base emotion, but some images were overladen with different subtle expressions that either didn’t correlate with an emotion or correlated with many. Where these were present, judgments became predictably less accurate.

However, there are still two major takeaways from this study. First, we can naturally identify basic emotions even at the subtle level, supporting the existence of certain universal emotional expressions. Second, we all have the ability to read microexpressions, but that this can be quite difficult.

At times where an individual is actively concealing their emotion, for instance, it will be very tricky to read, but that’s part of the reason to learn more about this subject, either through similar blog posts or through Humintell’s training programs!