Aided by science, a research group sets out to understand the body’s response to buying using  bio-metric bracelet technology that was developed by MIT’s Media Lab.

The Wall Street Journal reported that a market research agency fitted 50 shoppers from Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta with biometric bracelets to track their body’s response to shopping.

Why do companies want to know the body’s response to shopping?  Well, to be able to track the emotions attached to shopping in an effort to make products more marketable.

Basically they want to know how emotional states affect shopping in stores versus online.

The sensors in the bracelets monitor “electrodermal activity” or micro changes in sweat levels to gauge a person’s emotional response to the event.

The study, conducted by Interpublic Group of Cos., Shopper Sciences Unit, wants to clarify what sparks a reaction in shoppers and what doesn’t.

The study will benefit major marketers such as Hasbro and Coca-Cola.   The participants will be divided into two groups those shopping in stores and those online.  The online shoppers will also have facial recognition cameras attached to their computers for further information about their shopping experience.

“You are looking to tap that deep unconscious reason that people buy” says Donna Sturgess, president of New York-based Buyology Inc.

Many experts disagree with such studies.  They purport that these physiological changes are too complex to tie to a shopper’s behavior.

A few other studies on emotions and gift giving that we have blogged on in the past can be found here.

The old-fashioned survey, which relies on people’s honesty, is a thing of the past.  Technology seems to be the leading force in marketing consumerism.

What do you think about this new type of research?

An undisclosed airport in Britain is implementing this new technology that keeps an unwitting eye on people entering the country by scanning passengers for signs of truthfulness.

Mail Online News has reported on Britain’s new security defense.  This covert operation, if you will, could be used at passport control stations and in customs interview rooms.  The “new” deception detection tool has a greater advantage than the current tools such as electronic body scanners and metal detectors because it is being implemented without the knowledge of the person in question.

This device reads tiny changes in facial expressions such as eye movement and micro facial expressions that have corresponding reactions in the brain, which cause changes in the patterns of blood flow around the face.  The changes in blood flow to the face are picked up by thermal imaging cameras.  These “truthfulness” measurements can prove to be useful not only in airports but in a variety of places such as schools and business conferences.

The system’s designer Hassan Ugail, a professor of visual computing at the University of Bradford, commented on this software, ‘In an interview you can be talking to a person, then you basically just press a computer button and say:  “Was this person lying or not?”’

Detecting deception with just a click of the button can be misleading.  What do you think about this type of software?  Do “real” people also need to be trained to understand the nuances of human behavior for this to be a double edged sword for criminals?

Professor Ugail goes on to state, “What we try to do is experiment with the face itself, but it is purely non-invasive, which means the person is probably not aware the measurements are being taken.”

This system is still being developed but Ugail and his colleagues have claimed a 60-70 percent success rate.

What are your thoughts on this non-invasive lie detection technology?

Indeed, research has already suggested that income levels have a direct correlation to overall happiness, but that this was only to a certain extent.

Hamermesh and Abrevaya’s paper entitled “Beauty is the Promise of Happiness” is being released to economists this week. The paper is also posted on the website of the German-based Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

According to a USA Today article, the economists analyzed data from five large surveys conducted between 1971 and 2009 in the USA, Canada, Germany and Britain. They found that beautiful people are generally happier than the plain Jane or or even ugly Joe.

Participants were asked about their own levels of happiness; their looks were rated by interviewers face-to-face or from photographs. Those in the top 15% of people ranked by looks are more than 10% happier than those ranked in the bottom 10%.

Interestingly, although the findings hold true for both men and women, the researchers say beauty affects women’s happiness more directly than men’s. But ladies, don’t go out rushing to get cosmetic surgery, buy new clothes or makeup.

“I know all the cosmetics folks and clothes folks say they can make you prettier, but the evidence for it just isn’t there,” Hamermesh says, citing a 2002 study he conducted that looked at the effect of buying better clothes, hair and cosmetics.

“It doesn’t help much. … Your beauty is determined to a tremendous extent by the shape of your face, by its symmetry and how everything hangs together.”

What do you think about these findings? Do you think there is some level of truth to them?

Read more about this study in this Time Magazine article

Our thoughts go out to those who have been affected by this tragedy.

How can you help? Visit this informative Time Magazine Page.

Dr. Matsumoto’s judo club, East Bay Judo Institute, is also helping raise funds to send judo uniforms to children and adults who lost them in the disaster.

Find out how you can contribute by visiting their Facebook page.

New research conducted by Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyi Sung Hwang now relates the behavioral ability to cooperatively interact with people to cultural differences between the players.

In this study, US born Americans played a modified Prisoner’s Dilemma game in same sex dyads in one of three conditions: with another American (Control), with an international student (Intercultural Condition), or with another American but under stressful conditions (Stress Condition).

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang hypothesized that the Intercultural Condition would produce less cooperation and less positive behavioral outcomes than the Control Condition and that these behavioral differences would be linked to cultural differences in the dyad.

As predicted the Intercultural Condition produced less cooperation and more competition than the Control Condition and those behavioral differences were linked to cultural differences in the dyad.

Dr. Hyi Sung Hwang stated that, “The study showed that intercultural dyads (subjects from different countries; Americans vs. non-Americans) tended to be less cooperative and more competitive than the dyads of subjects from same countries (i.e., all Americans) when playing Prisoner’s Dilemma. This study was the first to link such behavioral outcomes with actual cultural differences between the interactants. This finding is significant because it shows how difficult intercultural interactions can be without even one’s awareness of it.”

The studies’ findings show that intercultural interactions are difficult and potentially costly, especially among strangers, which is important for many to recognize.

Identifying the specific source of the differences can help practitioners to target those variables in order to avoid unnecessary conflict and to facilitate cooperation and harmony in intercultural interactions.

This should be true in health-care interactions, negotiations, and business settings alike.

The study will be published in a future edition of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations and its title is Cooperation and Competition in Intercultural Interactions.

You can also take a look at other studies done by Humintell members by visiting the Research News page, accessible from The Science page on the Humintell site.

The law passed and it is  now illegal to wear niqabs in public places in France with fines and jail time if the law is  not followed .  As of July 2010, it was estimated that only 2,000 women wear full veils in France.  Not surprisingly, the bill [now a law in France] is opposed by the 5 million Muslims living there.

Critics argue that the law breaches French and European human rights legislation.  They contend that public places are too broadly defined and includes all streets, thoroughfares and entertainment venues.  Supporters of the bill claim that it is in support of women’s rights and not an effort to single out or stigmatize a religion.

With the implementation of this new law women can be  fined 150 euros for wearing their niqabs in public.  What is more interesting is that this law also proposes to punish husbands who force their wives to wear the burka.  They can receive a fine up to 30,000 euros and jail time.

What is your opinion on this new law?  Does it violate constitutional freedoms?  Can you see the need to eliminate the full facial veil in public places?

Watch this video and listen to the argument from the perspective of  a French woman who intends to ignore the new law and continue to wear her Niqab in public.

This feature, known as Tag Suggestions, will group faces together when uploading photos, and automatically suggest the friend they should be tagged with. Tag Suggestions has been made available to a limited amount of users, but it will be released to the entire Facebook community in the coming weeks.

Similar technology has already been implemented in Apple’s iPhoto software, as well as Google’s Picasa. However, the search for similar faces is limited to the user’s own photos that they have uploaded themselves; it would not search anyone else’s pictures. Since Tag Suggestions searches a user’s friends’ photos, questions about privacy have come up in the Facebook community.

As with every Facebook update, users have complained about the privacy issues regarding this technology. However, like many of the site’s features, it can be turned off if the user adjusts their privacy settings accordingly.

Also, Tag Suggestions would only search a user’s friends’ photos for comparisons, and the person uploading the pictures would have to confirm the tags. Facebook would not tag the photos automatically. Furthermore, if a user does not wish to be tagged in a certain picture, they may untag themselves. Would you use this feature, or are you planning to opt out?

It will be interesting to see just how accurate the algorithms are at identifying faces. Are you one of the select members that have been able to test out this feature? Did you find it to be useful and accurate?

Are you a fan of Dr. Matsumoto’s Facebook Page and Humintell’s Facebook Page?

Their project “The Recognition of Emotion in Human Speech” is a much updated version of the Voice Stress Analysis gauge (VSA), which was commercially developed in 1970 to detect deception from deviations of a base normal voice stress level.  The theory behind VSA is that physiological stress induced by lying causes inaudible fluctuations in the larynx.  These fluctuations are detected by a voice analyzer and then processed by a computer.

Unlike the VSA, the students’ program does not try to detect deception but relies on an emotional speech database with 18, 215 files to distinguish between five emotions, which they labeled as angry, sad (empathetic), happy, neutral, and rest.

On an npr radio interview Matthew Fernandez affirmed that their computer program utilizes the frequencies and energies in voice and tries to recognize what emotions are being spoken.  “We train our system using a bunch of audio (57 different audio features to be exact) that already been defined as either actors speaking angrily or happily.  And then when we get a new signal, we can compare it best with what we know about each of the energies and frequencies of the new signal.

Krishnan and Fernandez were able to achieve 90% accuracy in detecting happy and sad voices and 60% accuracy for their technology as a whole.  Previous research in this field had only resulted in 41 percent accuracy.

The teens were inspired by the movie I, Robot from a scene where the robot recognizes that its “user” is afraid and that it can protect him.  Akash and Matthew see many applications in the future for their program such as in call centers, virtual computer games, and possibly in lie detection.

What the high school students want most is to help children with autism who struggle to process the emotions of others.  They would like to create a wristwatch device that would use a happy face, sad face, angry face to display the emotions that are being spoken around them.  This could assist children with autism in interacting with their peers.

If you would like to hear more about the students story, check out the entire radio interview:

The study was conducted at the Virginia Commonwealth University by Drs. Ernest O’Boyle Jr., Ronald Humphrey, Jeffrey Pollack, Thomas Hawver and Paul Story.

Emotional intelligence as defined in a recent article by Science Daily is “a measure of someone’s ability to understand the emotions of themselves and others”.

During the course of their study, O’Boyle and his team “explored the three prominent testing procedures of emotional intelligence and found that each reliably predicts job performance based on empirical data”.

Through their study, O’Boyle, et. al discovered that high emotional intelligence does have a relationship to strong job performance. As Science Daily puts it, “in short, emotionally intelligent people make better workers”.

To us, this makes perfect sense. In our various workshops, we often stress that reading emotions in others and then reacting well is the key to building rapport with others.

In addition, recognizing emotions is a major component of most theories of emotional intelligence and Humintell has the only validated tools to measure and train it.

You can read the article in full here.

Dr. Shpancer cites the 1971 Stanford prison experiment as a prime example. In this study, students were put randomly into two groups: one of prisoners, and the other of prison guards. The researchers had the students act out their respective roles in a mock prison. Though the situation wasn’t real, the students’ emotional states changed so drastically (based on the role that they were given) that the experiment had to be stopped in six days, instead of the planned two weeks. The ‘guards’ had begun to be authoritarian, even subjecting some of the prisoners to intentional humiliation. Many of the ‘prisoners’ became depressed, and developed passive attitudes. Because they were behaving like guards and prisoners, the students developed emotions that corresponded with their actions.

The tendency for television and movie actors/actresses to fall in love while portraying an on-screen couple is cited as another example. “They have to act like people who care deeply for each other. They look into each other’s eyes, they touch each other. They act out the behaviors of love. No wonder the emotion of love often follows.”

Dr. Shpancer further goes on to discuss the work of psychologist/philosopher William James. He was one of the first theorists to notice that “without some kind of bodily response, we would not feel emotion.” James uses the example of striking someone who insults us: we don’t hit someone because we are angry; rather, we are angry because we strike. However, from a physiological standpoint, this doesn’t quite make sense. Hitting someone because we are angry is a very animal instinct. In the wild, one animal will attack another animal if they invade their territory or hurt their young. While the behavior may come before the emotion in many circumstances, our innate “fight or flight” response leads us to recognize and fear danger before deciding what action to take.

The article goes on to say that “the fastest way to change an emotion is to change the behavior attached to it.” Dr. Shpancer cites depression as a prime example. “After many failures and disappointments, people stopped trying and withdrew from the world; withdrawal and inactivity, however, decrease the possibility of positive interactions or experiences, hence isolation and passivity increase, hence depression.”

Mental health professionals have taken the idea of actions influencing emotions and put it towards therapeutic techniques to battle depression. One of these techniques, known as ‘activity planning,’ has patients reintroduce activities into their lives that are associated with achievement and pleasure. Tasks are broken into smaller steps, which “build chains of reinforcement to elicit successful behavior in the world.” This idea seems pretty logical. However, depression can be both situational and chemical. If there is an imbalance of the chemicals involved with our moods (serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine,) no amount of ‘activity planning’ will fix that. In these cases, the patient needs proper medication(s) before embarking on a path to change their lifestyle.

For most people, however, changing one’s behaviors can greatly influence their emotions. As Dr. Shpancer states, “ When you feel bad, don’t wait to feel good to do what you love. Start doing what you love. Good feelings will likely follow.”

What are your thoughts?

More on the Stanford Prison Experiment can be seen in the video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.