Experiment: work in progress

For the past couple of weeks I have been doing my experiment on several of my subjects. The results are very interesting and intriguing, but I want to share them after I finish all of my experiments. I plan to create a video (more on the artistic side) and an experiment report (the scientific side). I gathered some very valuable information. I also feel that I have learned way more knowledge implementing this process that reading all of those books about facial expressions.

Regarding the process of each of my experiments, I first start off by asking some simple questions like:

What is your name?
Where are you from?
Have you lived anywhere else before?
Do you know anything about facial expressions?
Do you believe in the universality of facial expressions?

Then, I show them the placards with facial expressions that I have prepared. I both record the video of them describing the emotion and have a paper form recording.

The paper form that I created looks like this:

Name:

☐ Male                         ☐Female

☐German                              ☐American                ☐Italian

☐Grade 10                  ☐Grade 11

Further description

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

P1

A1	A2	A3	A4
B1	B2	B3	B4
C1	C2	C3	C4

P2

A1	A2	A3
B1	B2	B3

P3

A1	A2	A3
B1	B2	B3

P4

A1	A2	A3
B1	B2	B3

P5(1)

A1

B1

C1

P5(2)

A1

B1

C1

I always ask the subjects to identify the same group of facial expression in order to test my hypothesis. I think so far the results are very interesting. I plan to finish all my experiments by the end of this week and finish my experiment report, stage 4 and final report during spring break. 

Experiment Plan: officially starting!!

For the past few weeks I have did some insightful research about the universality of facial expressions, and is finally starting my experiment tomorrow Wednesday, March 18th 2014 

[EXPERIMENT PLAN]

[Research Question]

It is commonly assumed that different culture groups have different ways of looking at things and different ways of expressing personalities.

How does cultural difference affect facial expressions?

[Hypothesis]

The study of facial expression can be traced back to the 19^th century. In fact, it was the famous English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin who was the first recorded scientist of proposing the idea of ‘universal facial expressions”.  Although the principles of Darwin’s studies were never facial expressions and his way of determining his theory is not rigorous, his later research was developed by modern scientists focusing on the psychology aspect. They developed Darwin’s program from a diversity of emotions to basic emotions and evaluated some key assumptions:

All human beings regardless of their culture easily recognize the seven (plus or minus 2) facial expressions.

The candidates of the seven basic emotions are happiness, surprise, fear, anger, contempt, disgust and sadness. Of course, different psychologies contain different opinions of these basic emotions. Dr. Paul Ekman does not include contempt. Silvan Tomkins categorizes facial expressions into: interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, anger-rage, and fear-terror.

On the contrast, there are also other opinions that facial expressions are varied from cultural differences such as anthropologist Margaret Mead and George Boston. Depending on common judgment facial expressions should be the same as culture traditions and rules as they should be different.

[Work cited]

Russell, James A., and Fernández Dols José Miguel. "What Does Facial Expressions Mean?" The Psychology of Facial Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 1-17. Print.

Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen. Unmasking the Face; a Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Print.

Based on the two different sides of theories, I predict that:

The Six basic emotions of facial expressions (happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness) should be generally universal, but might slightly vary in intensity depending on the cultural differences.

In order to test my hypothesis, I am going to plan an experiment on the recognitions (decoding) of distinct facial expressions.

[Variables]

Independent Variables: Culture/Nationality

Dependent Variable: the recognition of the emotion

[Constants]

Grade

Gender

[Procedures]

The two emotions I chose are fear and surprise.

1.      Prepare several facial pictures with either the emotion of fear and surprise

2.      Show the subjects of the pictures randomly and let them recognize the emotion. 

Interview

To prepare for my experiment. I asked several people for advice. I asked my chemistry teacher Dr. Tegg-Schuering for suggestions on the structure of my experiment plan. My supervisor Ms. Siviero advised that I should use present two different theories first before starting my experiment. I want the specifically thank Dr. Annette for agreeing to have an interview with her. The following is the questions I asked and the notes I took during the interview. 

Questions 

Q1: What made you get interested in facial expressions? Why did you decide to focus on the face?
Q2: What’s the most obvious difference between Macro and Micro facial expressions? In what conditions would they appear on the face?
Q3: What do you think is the first step of learning and understanding facial expressions?
Q4: Have you conducted any experiments to prove the relationship between emotions and facial expressions?
Q5: Do you believe that facial expressions are universal?
Q6: Do you agree with the seven universal emotion signals: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, surprise and happiness?
Q7: Do you know the TV series Lie To Me? Do you think the ability Dr. Lightman has is practical in real life?
Q8: Are you able to detect concealed emotions through facial expressions? If so, how has it changed your life?
Q9: Can you please list five books or other resources that influenced your thinking on facial expressions?
Q10: What do you think is the main improvements or questions of facial expressions psychologists need to focus on in the future?

Notes 

Advises

1.      The perspective that you are focusing on

i.               Neuroscience [which components of the brain is getting activated]

ii.              Psychology

iii.            Sociologist

2.      Counter Balancing: choose an valid reference/ tool

3.      Avoiding bias, because the data may be inaccurate according to the perspective your having

a)        Ex. I can’t switch the video clips, because I will be expecting an emotion to be provoked.

b)        Someone who plays the videos or recognizes the expressions

4.      The clarity of the research question. A clear research questions would be easier to carry out the experiment

Future focuses on the facial expressions

1.      Criminology

2.      Computers/technology detecting facial expressions

3.      Range and intensity changing over time

4.      How social media changes facial expressions.

Quotes: happiness

Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman, chapter 8: happiness, p.99-113

"Happiness is a positive emotion". 

"When pain stops, you are usually happy."

"In discussing each of the emotions, we have suggested that childhood experience leave their imprint, that personality may be shown in how each emotion is experienced." 

chapter 9 review: Sadness

Chapter 9 review: sadness

-         People are often sad because of losses. There is no physical pain from sadness; instead people suffer from loss, disappointment or hopelessness.

-         Sadness is a passive feeling

-         There are differences between distress and sadness

i.                Distress is usually caused by physical pain

ii.              Sadness usually follows distress, but they are still two separate emotions

iii.             Distress involves audible reactions, such as crying, whereas sadness is a more controlled and no active elements are visible

iv.             Usually sadness is more acceptable than distress for the person attempting to comfort. However, it doesn’t mean that sadness is better than distress for the person experiencing it.

v.              Distress is more obvious in appearance, thus more easier to ‘read’

-         The intensity of sadness

i.                   Mild sadness: being “blue” or gloomy

ii.                 Extreme sadness: mourning

iii.         Less intense sadness varies by the less apparent facial areas

-         Blending of sadness

i.                   Sadness most often blends with anger and fear

sadness (brows/forehead and eyes/upper eyelids) + disgust (mouth and lower eyelids) "Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman, p.125" 

sadness(brows/eyes) + anger (mouth) 

"Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman, p.124" 

sadness(brow/eyelids) + fear (mouth) 

"Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman, p.122" 

-         Facial expression of sadness

i.                   The inner corners of the eyebrows are drawn up

ii.                 The Skin below the eyebrow is triangulated, with the inner corner up

iii.                The upper eyelid inner corner is raised

iv.                The corners of the lips are down or the lip is trembling (Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman, p.126) 

Facial expression of sadness (Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman, p.127)