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. 

personal project: my plan

Name of Project	Investigating and Analyzing Micro Expressions
Period of Project	Sep 1st to May 26th
Purpose	For my personal project
Global Context	Scientific and Technical Innovation
Description of Project	Phase 1: Investigation -Purchase books  ‘Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life’, Paul Ekman, 2007  ‘Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Expressions’, Paul Ekman, 2003  ‘Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage’ Paul Ekman, 2009 -Create a blog updating my process in the investigation -Skype with experts and professors regarding facial expression or even cast from the TV Show ‘Lie to me’ Phase 2: Experiment -Asking around homerooms for student will to participate in this experiment from 10th grade to 12th grade. -Confirming free periods with students and as the specific subject teacher for permission. -Having one to one experiments -Video tape every experiment -Observe and compile the similar expressions Phase 3: Final Product Location- The Model United Nations, General Assembly
Goal	To recognize deceive in others and able to control my own facial expressions.