Can you read faces

But it has been widely criticized by scientists, members of the US Congress and organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union for being inaccurate and racially biased. The systems are being trialled or marketed for assessing the suitability of job candidates, detecting lies, making adverts more alluring and diagnosing disorders from dementia to depression. With researchers still wrangling over whether people can produce or perceive emotional expressions with fidelity, many in the field think efforts to get computers to do it automatically are premature — especially when the technology could have damaging repercussions.

The AI Now Institute, a research centre at New York University, has even called for a ban on uses of emotion-recognition technology in sensitive situations, such as recruitment or law enforcement 4.

Facial expressions are extremely difficult to interpret, even for people, says Aleix Martinez, who researches the topic at the Ohio State University in Columbus. The human face has 43 muscles, which can stretch, lift and contort it into dozens of expressions.

Despite this vast range of movement, scientists have long held that certain expressions convey specific emotions. One person who pushed this view was Charles Darwin. His book On the Origin of Species , the result of painstaking fieldwork, was a masterclass in observation. His second most influential work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , was more dogmatic.

Darwin noted that primates make facial movements that look like human expressions of emotion, such as disgust or fear, and argued that the expressions must have some adaptive function.

For example, curling the lip, wrinkling the nose and narrowing the eyes — an expression linked to disgust — might have originated to protect the individual against noxious pathogens. Only as social behaviours started to develop, did these facial expressions take on a more communicative role. Credit: Alamy. The first cross-cultural field studies, carried out by Ekman in the s, backed up this hypothesis. He tested the expression and perception of six key emotions — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust — around the world, including in a remote population in New Guinea 2 , 3.

Ekman chose these six expressions for practical reasons, he told Nature. Some emotions, such as shame or guilt, do not have obvious readouts, he says. And later work supported the claim that some facial expressions might confer an adaptive advantage 5.

In other words, our faces are powerless to hide our emotions. The obvious problem with that assumption is that people can fake emotions, and can experience feelings without moving their faces. But a growing crowd of researchers argues that the variation is so extensive that it stretches the gold-standard idea to the breaking point. Their views are backed up by a vast literature review 6. A few years ago, the editors of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest put together a panel of authors who disagreed with one another and asked them to review the literature.

Instead of starting with a hypothesis, they waded into the data. Faces alone only reveal so much about mood. Scroll down for the full picture.

At one extreme, the group cited studies that found no clear link between the movements of a face and an internal emotional state. Trying to assess internal mental states from external markers is like trying to measure mass in metres, Crivelli concludes. Another reason for the lack of evidence for universal expressions is that the face is not the whole picture.

Other things, including body movement, personality, tone of voice and changes in skin tone have important roles in how we perceive and display emotion. For example, changes in emotional state can affect blood flow, and this in turn can alter the appearance of the skin. Martinez and his colleagues have shown that people are able to connect changes in skin tone to emotions 7.

Clockwise, from top left: basketball player Zion Williamson celebrates a dunk; Mexico fans celebrate a win in a World Cup group match; singer Adele wins Album of the Year at the Grammys in ; Justin Bieber fans cry at a concert in Mexico City. In , responding to a critique from Barrett, he pointed to a body of work that he says supports his previous conclusions, including studies on facial expressions that people make spontaneously, and research on the link between expressions and underlying brain and bodily state.

His views have not changed, he says. Most people recognize an angry face when they see it, she adds, citing an analysis of nearly studies 9. Sauter and Tracy think that what is needed to make sense of facial expressions is a much richer taxonomy of emotions. Rather than considering happiness as a single emotion, researchers should separate emotional categories into their components; the happiness umbrella covers joy, pleasure, compassion, pride and so on. Expressions for each might differ or overlap.

Some studies use computers to randomly generate faces. Credit: C. Chen et al. At the heart of the debate is what counts as significant. Start Training View All Posts. Comments 2. Log in to Reply. Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Search Submit Clear. Paul Ekman. Training Tools.

Facial Action Coding System. If you think you're reading a negative emotion on the face of a prospective client, check that you're actually seeing what you think you are. This can be as simple as asking:.

You get the idea. Just remember the key take away here: It's not a good idea to take any expression at face value. Top Stories. Top Videos.