Emotion research gets real - Was this person just told a joke or told they have great hair?

How accurately could you tell from a person's display of behaviour and emotions what just happened to them?  Dhanya Pillai and her colleagues call this "retrodictive mindreading" and they say it's a more realistic example of how we perceive emotions in everyday life, as compared with the approach taken by traditional psychological research, in which volunteers name the emotions displayed in static photos of people's faces.

In Pillai's study, the task of a group of 35 male and female participants wasn't to look at pictures and name the facial expression. Instead, the participants watched clips of people reacting to a real-life social scenario and they had to deduce what scenario had led to that emotional display.

Half the challenge Pillai and her colleagues faced was to create the stimuli for this research. They recruited 40 men and women who thought they were going to be doing the usual thing and categorising emotional facial expressions. In fact, it was their own responses that were to become the stimuli for the study proper.

While these volunteers were sitting down ready for the "study" to start, one of four scenarios unfolded. The female researcher either told them a joke ("why did the woman wear a helmet at the dinner table? She was on a crash diet"); told them a story about a series of misfortunes she'd encountered on the way to work; paid them a compliment (e.g. "you've got really great hair, what shampoo do you use?"); or made them wait 5 minutes while she had a drink and did some texting. In each case the volunteers' emotional responses were recorded on film and formed the stimuli for the real experiment.

The researchers ended up with 40 silent clips, lasting 3 to 9 seconds each, comprising ten clips for each of the four scenarios. The real participants for the study proper were first shown footage of the researcher in the four scenarios and how these were categorised as joke, story, compliment or waiting. Then these observer participants watched the 40 clips of the earlier volunteers, and their task in each case was to say which scenario the person in the video was responding to.

The observing participants' performance was far from perfect - they averaged 60 per cent accuracy - but it was far better than the 25 per cent level you'd expect if they were merely guessing. By far, they were most skilled at recognising when a person was responding to the waiting scenario (90 per cent accuracy). Their accuracy was even for the other scenarios at around 50 per cent. They achieved this success level despite the huge amount of variety in the way the different volunteers responded to the different scenarios. "From observing just a few seconds of a person's reaction, it appears we can gauge what kind of event might have happened to that individual with considerable success," the researchers said.

A surprise detail came from the recordings of the observing participants' eye movements. They focused more on the mouth region rather than the eyes. Based on past research (much of it using static facial displays), Pillai and her colleagues thought that better accuracy would go hand-in-hand with more attention paid to the eye region of the targets' faces. In fact, for three of the scenarios (all except the joke), the opposite was true. This may be because focusing on the eye region is more beneficial when naming specific mental states, as opposed to the "retrodictive mindreading"challenge involved in the current study.

In contrast to much of the existing psychology literature, Pillia and her team concluded that theirs was an important step towards devising tasks "that closely approximate how we understand other people's behaviour in real life situations."

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Pillai, D., Sheppard, E., and Mitchell, P. (2012). Can People Guess What Happened to Others from Their Reactions? PLoS ONE, 7 (11) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049859

Note: the picture above is for illustrative purposes only and was not used in the study.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

What's it like to be face-blind?

Most of us take the ability to recognise each other for granted. What must it be like to go through life unable to identify and distinguish people based on their facial appearance?

Some idea comes from a new, candid first-person account written for the journal Cognitive Neuropsychology by a doctor about his life-long face-blindness (known formally as prosopagnosia). It's a problem he didn't even realise he had for 30 years, and which he only discovered was a neuropsychological condition in 2006, when he was diagnosed for the first time. "It now seems remarkable that I lived at least half my life with a socially disabling condition of which not only myself, but also those around me, seemed unaware," writes Dr David Roger Fine, a gastroenterologist at the University of Southampton.

Looking back at his childhood, Fine realises that he can remember school buildings with detail, the clothes worn by his male friends, the hairstyles of the girls - but no faces. He got into difficulties in the playground confusing "high- and low- status boys", and was admonished for not raising his cap to his form teacher when he encountered her out of context and so failed to recognise her.

At senior school he made friends with a close-knit group, all of whom were physically distinctive and so easy to distinguish. In his professional life, Fine describes how there are some situations where his condition doesn't matter - such as committee meetings, where everyone keeps the same seat, and when he's giving a conference presentation. His job as a hospital doctor also involves distinct spatial areas of work and he uses these environmental contexts to help him judge who he is likely to encounter at any given time. Nonetheless, he often walks right past colleagues, earning him a reputation as capricious and aloof. More than once he's been accused of having Asperger's.

In his personal life, before marriage, romantic liaisons were especially problematic. Although women often dress in more distinctive ways than men, they also vary their appearance more often, for example changing their hair style and make-up after work. "It seemed to me that girls popped out of the Ether in one place then disappeared perhaps for months or even years before reappearing in another place, often disgruntled," he says.

Before his wife became his companion and minder, parties were particularly awkward and stressful. "I once met and had a long conversation with a man at a Christmas party," Fine recalls. "We circulated until we met again at the other side of the room and I introduced myself [again]. He looked puzzled until my wife came to my rescue." Making friends is nigh on impossible. "Recognising" strangers is a constant embarrassing risk.

Fine has had a successful career in spite of his prosopagnosia, but he feels his success was "blunted" by the condition. Now aged 60 he has highly developed strategies for coping - he has a better sense of people's age, which is one of the criteria he uses to distinguish people. The ethnic mix of modern Britain also helps. And he tries to focus on distinct items of jewellery, such as people's rings, that tend to be worn at all times. The increased popularity of tattoos is another help, although it can cause problems too - one female colleague with a tattoo low on her chest visible in summer clothes "caused consternation in the corridor [one winter] as she unbuttoned her blouse by way of identification."

Looking to the future, Fine is worried that his confusion about people's identity could lead to him being misdiagnosed with dementia. "During a recent hospital stay I asked the nurses to introduce themselves every time, as I was concerned that I might be misdiagnosed as confused if I muddled them up."

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Experts used to think that the inability to recognise faces was a problem that nearly always arose after brain injury. In recent years, however, it's become apparent that many people are born with face-blindness (or develop it early in life), with the prevalence estimated at two per cent of the population. Do you have the condition or know anyone who has? How do you/they cope?

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Fine, D. (2012). A life with prosopagnosia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 1-6 DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2012.736377

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Most people can fake a genuine "Duchenne" smile

For years, the literature on the psychology of smiling has claimed that fake smiles can be easily and reliably distinguished from genuine smiles by the absence of crinkling around the eyes. The eye crinkling of a supposedly real "Duchenne smile" (named after a Dutch physician with a fondness for electrodes) is caused by activation of the orbicularis oculi muscles, which raises the cheeks. The traditional view is that this muscle is not within voluntary control, unlike the zygomatic major muscle that bends the mouth upwards into a smile. Fake smiles therefore feature the upturned mouth but there's something missing in the eyes, or so it was long claimed.

Doubts first emerged in a 2009 paper, in which Duchenne smiles were produced just as often when participants pretended to be amused, as when they were genuinely amused. Now a research team led by Sarah Gunnery has provided more evidence that undermines the old beliefs about Duchenne smiles being a reliable sign of true positive emotion.

Gunnery and her colleagues had 96 student participants (49 men) pull smiling faces into a camera while role-playing genuine positive emotion (e.g. pleasure at a good exam grade) or while role-playing fake positive emotion (e.g. smiling in response to a gift that's not really liked).

Overall, 28 per cent of the smiles were rated by two experienced coders as Duchenne smiles, with the characteristic crinkling around the eyes. This broke down as 31 per cent for positive situations and 24 per cent in the fake positive situations. When naive viewers rated these smiles, they tended to say the Duchenne smiles were more genuine, but this was largely because eye crinkling tended to go hand in hand with more expressive smiling around the mouth.

Next, the participants were presented with a photograph of a person pulling a Duchenne smile and another showing a "fake" smile with no eye crinkling, and their task was to imitate both. Seventy-one per cent successfully imitated the Duchenne smile, and 69 per cent successfully imitated the fake smile.

These results explode the myth that it's not possible to fake a "genuine" Duchenne smile. They also hint at this being a skill that varies from person to person. It was the same participants who tended to display Duchenne smiles in the various conditions of the experiment. Moreover, these Duchenne participants reported feeling that they'd done a good job in the tasks, and they said they were able to pull fake expressions in their daily lives, all of which suggests they have good insight into their facial abilities.

A weakness of the study is its reliance throughout on staged emotion. While the evidence is clear that many people can fake the Duchenne in neutral conditions (albeit while imagining emotional scenarios), we don't know how easy it is for people to do this under conditions in which they truly are experiencing negative emotion. On the other hand, because there were no explicit instructions in the role-playing tasks to pull a Duchenne smile, nor were there any consequential outcomes to provide extra motivation, the prevalence of the ability to fake Duchenne smiles in neutral conditions may actually have been underestimated.

"Findings from the present study strengthen the argument that people can volitionally activate their cheek raiser muscle and put on a Duchenne smile," Gunnery and her team concluded. "Future research will further investigate individual differences, and will use behavioural outcomes to measure similarities in people who deliberately produce the Duchenne smile."

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Gunnery, S., Hall, J., and Ruben, M. (2012). The Deliberate Duchenne Smile: Individual Differences in Expressive Control Journal of Nonverbal Behavior DOI: 10.1007/s10919-012-0139-4

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Paranormal believers and religious people are more prone to seeing faces that aren't really there

Our brains are so adept at detecting faces that we often see them in random patterns, such as clouds or the gnarled bark of a tree. Occasionally one of these illusory faces comes along that resembles a celebrity and the story ends up in the news - like when Michael Jackson's face appeared on the surface of a piece of toast. A new study asks whether some people are more prone than others to perceiving these illusory faces.

Tapani Riekki and his team collected dozens of photos that judges in pilot work agreed did or did not have the appearance of faces in them (this included pictures of furniture, places, and natural scenes, such as a rock-face). The researchers then used two adverts to recruit their participants - they were identical except that one requested people who "view the paranormal positively or believe that there is an invisible spiritual world," while the other requested people who are "sceptical about paranormal phenomena".

Forty-seven people were eventually selected to take part, based on their being particularly paranormal-believing, religious, sceptical or atheist (there was a lot of overlap in membership between the first two and final two categories). The participants were shown the photos and had to indicate whether a "face-like area" was present, where it was in the image, and they had to say how face-like the image was, and how emotional.

The key finding is that people who scored high in paranormal belief or religiosity were more likely to see face-like areas in the pictures compared with the sceptics and atheists. They weren't more sensitive to the illusory faces as such, because they also scored a lot of false alarms - saying there was a face when there wasn't. However, when they spotted a face-like pattern correctly, they were more accurate than sceptics and atheists at saying where exactly in the pictures the illusory faces were located. Finally, the paranormal believers rated the illusory faces as more face-like and emotional than the sceptics.

The researchers said their findings are consistent with past research showing that belief in the paranormal tends to go hand-in-hand with a tendency to jump to conclusions based on inadequate evidence. They added that the results support the idea that religious people and paranormal believers have the habit of seeing human-like attributes, including mental states, in "inappropriate realms."

"We may all be biased to perceive human characteristics where none exist," Riekki and his team concluded, "but religious and paranormal believers perceive them even more than do others."

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Riekki, T., Lindeman, M., Aleneff, M., Halme, A., and Nuortimo, A. (2012). Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2874

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Cheeky pictures suggest psychologists identify with the arts

What does it matter which side of your face you show when you're having your photograph taken?  A team of scientists say that it reflects how much you see yourself as emotional and arty or rational and scientific. Owen Churches and his colleagues analysed the personal webpages belonging to 5,829 English-language university academics around the world. They found that engineers, mathematicians and chemists more often posed with their right cheek; English lit. dons and psychologists with their left. "... [M]ost academic psychologists, who may have entered the profession during its arts oriented past, perceive themselves as being more akin to arts academics than scientists," said Churches and co.

The researchers made their observations after choosing 30 universities at random from the 200 listed by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2010 to 2011. When they found scholarly departments where the convention was for academics to present a photo of themselves, they went on to analyse all academic photos to see which cheek was visible. Straight-on photos were ignored. That left 3168 photos for analysis. Consistent with previous research there was a strong effect of sex - women more often pose with their left cheek showing. But the differences between the arts and science academics held even after controlling for this confound. The contrast also survived an analysis that excluded any photos that looked like they'd been taken by a professional photographer.

These new findings build on past research that's shown the left side of the face is perceived as more emotionally expressive than the right; that emotionally expressive people are more likely to pose with the left cheek showing; that, historically, people have tended to pose more often with their left side showing, but older portraits of scientists, in contrast, show them posing more often with their right cheek; and that viewers tend to guess that an unknown academic posing with their right cheek is a scientist, whilst guessing that left-cheek posers are arts scholars. These findings, Churches and his team explained, "suggest a difference in the inward role of the two cerebral hemispheres in the creation and analysis of the emotional display ... ".

In the current study, the general pattern of cheek posing and academic affiliation broke down when it came to fine arts and performing arts - they showed no bias for posing with their left side. The researchers speculated this may be because of their expert knowledge of the history of portraiture.

Critics may wonder about the researchers' interpretation that the posing position of psychologists suggests they identify with the arts. This seems quite a leap from the data that's available. It's also worth noting that there's a huge amount of variation within each academic discipline in posing position. Even among male engineers, for example, nearly 40 per cent posed with their left side facing the camera.

"Academics be warned," the researchers concluded. "We present ourselves to our students and colleagues in our profile pictures and the way we do so may reveal more about ourselves than we think."
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Churches O, Callahan R, Michalski D, Brewer N, Turner E, Keage HA, Thomas NA, & Nicholls ME (2012). How academics face the world: a study of 5829 homepage pictures. PloS One, 7 (7) PMID: 22815695

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Faces covered by a niqab are seen as less happy and expressing more shame

The wearing of face veils (the niqab) by Muslim women has become a politically sensitive issue in recent years. The practice is banned in France and similar laws are planned, or already in place, in many other Western European countries including Belgium, The Netherlands and Austria. In the UK, in 2006 the then Government Minister Jack Straw caused controversy when he suggested that wearing the niqab interferes with face-to-face communication and he'd prefer it if the practice were dropped. Now for the first time psychologists have tested the effects of the niqab on the facial communication of emotion.

A team led by Agneta Fischer at the University of Amsterdam showed four short videos to 58 Dutch students (23 had previously had contact with a niqab-wearer; 25 had Muslims among their family and friends). The silent videos showed a woman (one of three actresses) telling a story that was either emotionally neutral, happy, made her angry or made her feel shame. Crucially, some of the participants viewed videos in which the woman was wearing a niqab; others viewed a woman with horizontal black bars on the screen concealing the top of her head and her lower face; and others viewed a version in which the woman's head and face were uncovered (see picture). The participants' task was to rate the intensity of emotions expressed by the woman in each clip.

The niqab seemed to change the facial communication of emotion. Participants who viewed the woman wearing a niqab rated her expression of happiness as less intense than participants who viewed the other two videos. Moreover, participants who viewed videos of a woman with her face covered (be that with the niqab or the horizontal bars) rated her expression of shame as more intense, compared with participants who viewed a woman with an uncovered face. The perception of anger in the videos was unaffected by face covering, probably because anger is expressed principally via furrowing of the brow, which was visible regardless of face covering.

After viewing the video clips, the participants were asked about their attitudes toward the niqab. Those who'd seen clips showing a woman with a covered face (the niqab or the horizontal bars) expressed more negative attitudes toward the niqab, and this was mediated by the amount of negative emotion they perceived in the video clips. In other words, the researchers said, "we may conclude that the attempt to decode emotions in covered faces leads one to perceive more negative emotions, which in turn influences how one feels about covering one's face."

There is a weakness in the study methodology. The clips featuring the horizontal bars were created by using software to overlay the bars on the footage of the women filmed without their heads covered. The niqab videos, by contrast, were filmed separately with the women actually wearing the niqabs, so it's possible the actresses may have behaved differently whilst wearing the veils. However, this doesn't diminish the main point that both forms of face covering affected the communication of emotion.

Fischer and her colleagues concluded that the niqab may have the effect of exaggerating the perceived amount of negative emotion expressed by a wearer, whilst diminishing the perceived amount of positive emotion. "The present research thus supports some of the concerns that have been expressed in political debates concerning the negative effects of wearing niqabs in social settings," they said.

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Fischer, A., Gillebaart, M., Rotteveel, M., Becker, D., and Vliek, M. (2012). Veiled Emotions: The Effect of Covered Faces on Emotion Perception and Attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3 (3), 266-273 DOI: 10.1177/1948550611418534

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Faces are considered more attractive when they're moving

Here's some comforting news for anyone who despairs at how they look in photos - research by psychologists at the Universities of California and Harvard finds that the same people are rated as more attractive in videos than in static images taken from those videos. In other words, if you think you look awful in that holiday snap - don't worry, you probably look much better in the flesh when people can see you moving.

Robert Post and his team call the relative unattractiveness of static faces, "the frozen face effect". They think it may have to do with the way we form an impression of a moving face that's averaged across the various positions and profiles of that face. This would fit earlier findings showing that more average faces are judged as more attractive. Another possibility is that we find moving faces more attractive because "they optimally drive the neural mechanisms of face recognition". After all, the camera was only invented relatively recently and our face processing brain systems evolved to process moving faces, not still ones.

Post and his colleagues made their findings by asking a handful of participants to rate how "flattering" or "attractive" 20 people looked in two-second video clips and in 1200 static frames taken from those clips. The same faces were consistently rated as more attractive and flattering in the video clips than in the stills.

Further experiments attempted to establish the mechanism underlying this effect. It was found that the same rule held with the videos and stills turned up-side down. The researchers also showed the effect is nothing to do with the videos containing more information: when the "flattering" ratings of an ensemble of multiple stills of a face was compared against ratings of those same stills in a video, once again the video received the more positive ratings. Memory didn't seem to be a factor either - more or less flattering images weren't remembered any better than average. However it was found that to be judged as more flattering, videos do need to run in sequence. Jumbled-up, out-of-sequence videos of a face didn't receive higher ratings than stills of that face.

The researchers said their findings could explain why portrait photography is so challenging. "... [The frozen face effect] may explain why photography of faces is so difficult to master and why people anecdotally believe they look worse in photographs," they said.

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Post, R., Haberman, J., Iwaki, L., and Whitney, D. (2012). The Frozen Face Effect: Why Static Photographs May Not Do You Justice. Frontiers in Psychology, 3 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00022

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The stroke patient for whom strangers look normal whilst family look strange

Neuropsychologists in The Netherlands and the UK have documented the curious case of a 62-year-old stroke patient whose brain damage affected her perception of familiar faces whilst leaving her perception of unfamiliar faces intact

The woman, referred to as J.S., struggled to recognise family, fared slightly better with celebrities, whilst having no problems correctly categorising as unfamiliar the faces of complete strangers. When the woman's daughters came to visit her in hospital, she had no trouble recognising the daughter she hadn't seen for eight years, but struggled to identify her other daughter who visited daily.

Joost Heutink and his team confirmed this pattern of deficits by comparing J.S.'s performance against three age-matched women in a series of face recognition tasks. As well as having impaired recognition of her family (and to a lesser extent celebrities), J.S. also reported that the appearance of her family members was distorted. For example, she said her grandchildren looked grossly overweight and that they were a deep tanned colour. J.S. also had a general problem recognising emotional facial expressions.

Further details came from recordings of J.S.'s skin conductance (a measure of physiological arousal) when she looked at various faces. This showed that she experienced more arousal after looking at family members' faces as opposed to strangers and celebrities. This is normal, although the peak and latency of this arousal was delayed relative to the control participants.

So what explains J.S.'s pattern of deficits? Those familiar with neuropsychology may be reminded of Capgras Syndrome, in which the patient claims that one or more close relations have been replaced by an imposter. But J.S. does not have this syndrome. People with Capgras say that the imposter is a perfect likeness to the real relation. By contrast, J.S. does not think her relations are imposters, she just struggles to identify them and thinks their appearance has been distorted.

J.S.'s condition also bears some resemblance to prosopagnosia - a specific deficit affecting face recognition. Again, this doesn't really match J.S.'s neuropsychological profile. After all, her recognition of strangers' faces as unfamiliar was near perfect. Moreover, the brain region that's normally damaged in proposopagnosia - the fusiform face area - was unaffected in J.S.'s brain.

Joost Heutink and his colleagues think part of the answer may lie with a rare condition known as prosopometamorphopsia - in which other people's faces are perceived as being warped or distorted. The researchers suggest J.S. may have a form of this condition that interacts in some way with the emotional meaning of faces. So, if a face affects her emotionally (as happens with family), she perceives their face as distorted, which also has the side-effect of affecting her conscious recognition. This account fits with the distribution of brain damage in J.S.'s brain. In particular she suffered damage to the posterior superior temporal sulcus, which it's been suggested is involved in merging information about face identity with emotional context and meaning.

This account also helps explain two exceptions to J.S.'s relatively superior performance in recognising celebrity faces vs. family members. When it came to images of Hitler and Bin Laden (characters likely to trigger an emotional response), she believed they actually depicted imposters, and poor ones at that.

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Heutink, J., Brouwer, W., Kums, E., Young, A., and Bouma, A. (2012). When family looks strange and strangers look normal: A case of impaired face perception and recognition after stroke. Neurocase, 18 (1), 39-49 DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2010.547510

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.