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Facial expressions are a powerful way for humans to communicate their feelings. Understand its meaning allows us to recognize fundamental emotions like joy, fear or anger, which is essential for the interaction with other people. A wide-eyed look of fear, for example, can be a sign to we move away from a situation involving real risks; a happy face can convey confidence and indicate that we are on the right track. The correct interpretation of the signals enables us to act appropriately in different situations.
Many researchers seek to discover how facial recognition occurs and why some individuals have difficulty to perceive these signals. A technique used to assess the ability of people to understand the feelings of others through their expressions is the test called FEEL (Facially Expressed Emotion Labeling), which consists in presenting a picture of a face on a computer screen, followed by the presentation of the same face showing one of the six basic emotions considered: joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust or surprise. At the end, participants should tell what sentiment was expressed in the image.
By means of such tests, it was demonstrated that although the recognition of the expressions occur almost immediately, not all feelings are perceived as easily. Joy, anger and surprise are correctly understood most of the time; while disgust, sadness and fear cause some confusion. Furthermore, although the full view of the face allows a more efficient realization of the expressions, some of the emotions are detected almost exclusively in the upper face (eyes and nose), such as fear; while others, such as joy, become apparent on the bottom (side of the face and mouth).
Indeed, studying the case of patient S.M., who had great difficulty to recognize fear in the peoples’ face, due to an injury in the amygdala, the researcher Ralph Adolphs noticed a significant difference between the patients and healthy subjects at the time of tests application, while the latter was guided by the eye expression of the scared person, S.M. avoided staring this region in the face evaluated, making it difficult to interpret the emotion that was being expressed. Direct the focus of attention for the right place is a requirement for a good understanding of signals.
In addition to the clinical application, the reading of facial expressions has been increasingly used as a technique to assist in the evaluation of satisfaction/ dissatisfaction of consumers during interaction with products. Quantifying the experience of a person with a product only through subjective questionnaires does not always produce reliable results, because not everyone feels comfortable to reveal their real feelings. Thus, to count on a more natural means of assessment is of great value. A recent study (Danner et al., 2013) has shown a correlation between subjective ratings assigned by participants to samples of orange juice and facial expressions after consumption, as discussed below.
At first, the so-called implicit experiment, consumers proved the juice samples and attributed a score ranging from 1 (like extremely) to 9 (dislike extremely) and had their facial expressions analyzed by a software able to recognize basic emotions or neutral. They were unaware they were being filmed. The results showed a correlation between the faces "neutral", "angry" and "disgusted" and hedonic score; however, the face "happy" was not itemized. In a second step, the volunteers participated of the explicit experiment, in which they were asked to rate the samples through intentional facial expressions, and in this new situation there was a strong correlation with the subjective evaluations, especially for faces "happy" and "disgusted”. The reading of facial expressions can thus be an effective tool to evaluate the interaction of consumers with products.
Maria Cristina Valzachi
References
Danner L, Sidorkina L, Joechl M, Duerrschmid K. Make a face! Implicit and explicit measurement of facial expressions elicited by orange juices using face reading technology. Food Quality and Preference. 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2013.01.004;
Traue HC. Mímica facial. Revista Mente e Cérebro. Coleção Como o Cérebro Interpreta o Mundo. São Paulo; Duetto Editorial. 2012; p.12-17;
Picture: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mask_Shopping_(5477910485).jpg