Uncertain smile

I could never fake an emotion; never, even if I had to. Whatever I feel, shows on my face. The other side of that is, am I able to read facial expressions with the same matching record? I once took a BBC online test that tests how good one is in reading facial expressions and I aced it. That really surprised me because I have never considered myself (and I think my family and close friends would agree) to be especially equipped in the area of figuring out human behavior in social interactions. I think I will take it again soon to double check.

We have evolved to recognize facial expressions because it is crucial to our survival. If we did not get cues from our fellow human beings on how they feel about situations, especially about each other, we would not be able to get the warning or the help that we need to get us through our days. One ubiquitous facial expression is the smile.

A smile can mean many things. It can be a nervous smile, a smile of acknowledgement, and of course, a smile to express pleasure and delight. But I bet you did not know that we also smile when we are frustrated. This is one of things that were revealed by a study published last April 11 in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. It was also reported last May in Livescience.com.

I watched the portion of the experiment when they captured participants which they subjected to a frustrating exercise (a questionnaire which when finished loops back to the beginning.)  They really did smile! That was proof that a face could really launch a thousand meanings!

The study also tested whether people could actually detect genuine smiles, either from frustration or happiness. It turns out that people can only detect the right expression half of the time. But when the participants were tested to identify the kind of smile from people who were just faking frustration or happiness, the subjects were able to tell the expressions apart. Why? Because apparently, when we fake frustration, we do not smile.

It turns out that the timing of the smile (whether it shows up right away on one’s face or builds up) has to do with the emotion. A smile of happiness generally builds up while a smile of frustration quickly appears and also quickly fades. The researchers built in this timing in a computer program to test if a program could detect the right smile. And the computer did, 90 percent of the time.

The researchers said this was useful in programming computers that aid in helping individuals with difficulty reading facial expressions, like autistic persons. Normally, a “smile” is taught to represent “happiness” but with this finding, science was awakened to other emotions, like frustration, as one to cause us to smile.

In the article that appeared in Livescience, I took note of a quote from one of the study’s researchers, who said that the “analysis could also be useful in creating computers that respond in ways appropriate to the moods of their users,” computers that are “more intelligent and respectful.” Considering that young people are practically raised with computers as co-parents, I guess this makes sense. When I talk to my nephews and niece, I require them to put down their gadgets – cellphones, iPads, iPods, earphones, etc). I tell them that we shall engage in a face-to-face encounter just like the ancients did. They laugh but what they don’t know is that gives me a tinge of sadness that I had to demand it from beings who have two sets of eyes and faces which have evolved to express so many meanings. 

I have been having this nasty thought that maybe without knowing it or realizing the magnitude, we have started to give up in our own efforts to teach our young people be more responsive to others and “more intelligent and respectful” and decided to focus on teaching computers instead. Maybe inserting a smiley or a “frowney” for that matter, even with its hundreds of configurations, could never come close to a genuine smile or frown. But maybe one day, we would have fully surrendered to our gadgets as the only way to launch our expressions.

I don’t know about you but I have this uneasy feeling that a computer would have the final word on which is a genuine smile and which is a fake. For now, I think I will take the mishaps stemming from the misreading of facial expressions.  

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