Expression of the Day August 17, 2015
There is a great expression in this MSN article: A Milestone in Africa: One Year Without a Case of Polio
What expression do you see?
How Much You Smile Could Predict Your Divorce Potential
In a 2009 study from DePauw University, researchers found that how much you smiled as a child and young adult could accurately predict your divorce potential. Check it out.
I find that fascinating because I believe emotional expressions are windows to our soul, and who we are as people. I also believe we are hard-wired to feel certain emotions. I suspect that our facial structure actually predisposes us to feel certain emotions more than others. The reason I say that is people who have what I call a very happy face structure (high check bones, broad smiles, and round faces) are typically happy people. Ask people with these faces next time, and they can’t help but smile! And people with heavy brows often stress and frown more. It’s just the way it is.
People who have droopy outer corners of their eyes will have more of a tendency to feel sadness.
So I absolutely believe people who frown more and smile less are much more likely to have a marriage end in divorce. Do you?
Personality-Based Emotional Intelligence Test
I have been spending time trying to understand more information about emotional intelligence, and how it combines with my ability to spot deception. Having read about emotional intelligence lately, I am finding the definitions fall short in describing the depth of my “tool set”, for a lack of a better term. While I do understand emotions extremely well, I believe there is more to reading people than just emotions. Emotions, to me, are a subset of my skills, as is deception detection. It’s one element, but not the largest element. Does that make sense?
The boarder picture is understanding people and human behavior, and one explanation that I have been exploring lately is personality intelligence. I seem to have templates in my head for understanding people. I feel like I live in a world without strangers. Maybe its due to pattern-matching of facial features, emotions, and behaviors together? I am trying to understand it more.
Today in my quest for more information, I took a test online, the Personality-Based Emotional Intelligence Test. When my score popped up, it said I scored higher than 96.2% of people who took the test. That caught my eye. I found the test easy and required little thought. I missed three answers. I wrote the website owner to find out more information about this test and the research behind it (see comments below–people are getting the same score for different answers–uh oh!).
I truly believe who wrote this test gets it! They understand what I am doing and I’d like to learn more about it! This correlates to the “facial profiling service” I offer.
On the website where the test is given, it says:
This website has been offering a wide selection of psychological tests, mostly personality tests, since late 2011 and has given millions of results since then. It exists to educate the public about various personality tests, their uses and meaning, the various theories of personality and also to collect research data. This website is under continuous development and new tests and information are being added all the time.
This website also exists for the promotion of open source assessments and open data. A number of open source measures of popular psychological constructs have been developed and are made available under a creative commons licence on this website, see the full list. Also, at the end of every test users are asked if their data can be saved and used for research. The (anonymous) data that this yields can be downloaded from the data page. This data has already been used in several academic articles.
How did you score on the test?
Have you heard of Personal Intelligence?
“Personal intelligence is defined as: “the capacity to reason about personality and to use personality and personal information to enhance one’s thoughts, plans, and life experience.” (Mayer, 2008, p. 209)”
I find this utterly fascinating because I practice this in my life daily! Understanding personalities, through the use of emotions, behavior, demeanor, words spoken, etc., is a key factor in every interaction in my life!
Someone has put words to it!
Check this out:
Are you privileged?
When you ask most people if they grew up privileged, I think most people of us will say no.
We all imagine the privileged to be the super wealthy–the types of people who have maids, drivers, chefs, planes, fancy cars and mansions.
But the reality is many of us are more privileged than we realize. And some of us have had to work twice as hard to overcome the lack of privileges that others took for granted.
Have you ever thought about it?
Privilege is not something you earned. It was given to you.
What if you didn’t have the privileges you had or have? Where would you be life? Would you be in the same place? And have the same successes? Would you be just as happy?
Imagine if the privileges you value now were taken from you. They were gone. You no longer felt safe in your expression, to get help or medical care. How would you feel?
There is likely someone in your life right now who is in those shoes. Have you ever thought about how it would make you feel? And how they must feel?
Does this experiment open your eyes and change how you might look at other people?
I think it is profound exercise that evokes strong emotions. I hope it stirs yours…