Science

Computer better than a human at telling if you're faking it

Computer better than a human at telling if you're faking it
Which expression do you think shows real pain? (Photo: UC San Diego)
Which expression do you think shows real pain? (Photo: UC San Diego)
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Which expression do you think shows real pain? (Photo: UC San Diego)
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Which expression do you think shows real pain? (Photo: UC San Diego)

A computer-vision system able to detect false expressions of pain 30 percent more accurately than humans has been developed. Authors of the study, titled Automatic Decoding of Deceptive Pain Expressions, believe the technology has the potential for detecting other misleading behaviors and could be applied in areas including homeland security, recruitment, medicine and law.

“As with causes of pain, these scenarios also generate strong emotions, along with attempts to minimize, mask, and fake such emotions, which may involve dual control of the face,” said Marian Bartlett, research professor at University of California San Diego’s Institute for Neural Computation, and lead author of the study. “In addition, our computer-vision system can be applied to detect states in which the human face may provide important clues as to health, physiology, emotion, or thought, such as drivers’ expressions of sleepiness, students’ expressions of attention and comprehension of lectures, or responses to treatment of affective disorders.”

The joint study, by researchers at the University of California and the University of Toronto, found that humans could not discern real from faked expressions of pain better than random chance. Even after being told what signs to watch out for, people could still only manage to spot the fake 55 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the computer was correct 85 percent of the time.

“The computer system managed to detect distinctive dynamic features of facial expressions that people missed,” Prof Bartlett said. “Human observers just aren’t very good at telling real from faked expressions of pain.”

The study found the single most predictive feature of falsified expressions of pain is the mouth, specifically how wide and how frequently it opens. It was observed that when you are faking pain your mouth opens with less variation than when you are in real pain.

“In highly social species such as humans, faces have evolved to convey rich information including expressions of emotion and pain,” said senior author Kang Lee, professor at the Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto. “Because of the way our brains are built, people can simulate emotions they’re not actually experiencing, so successfully that they fool other people. The computer is much better at spotting the subtle differences between involuntary and voluntary facial movements. By revealing the dynamics of facial action through machine vision systems, our approach has the potential to elucidate ‘behavioral fingerprints’ of the neural-control systems involved in emotional signaling.”

Next the researchers plan to explore if a lack of variation in facial expressions is a feature of misleading behavior in general. Their work is published in the journal Current Biology.

Source: UC San Diego

9 comments
9 comments
TJG
So, which is it? I'm going with A.
Norman Bouchal
The person reading the article is the one in pain because the author with held the answer to the teaser!
[Sorry, that's our fault. The real one is B! - Ed.]
christopher
Glad I wasn't a test subject on that one!
Dirk Scott
If you are male there is a way to retain your personal privacy despite all this growing intrusive computer emotional analysis.
If you do this they cannot see what you are thinking. I've done it and now no- one (and no thing) knows what I'm thinking, not even my wife.
The Vikings were reputedly difficult to negotiate with because they did it.
Reclaim the most obvious sign of your masculinity ...grow a big wooly beard!
Lewis M. Dickens III
Spot Integrity?
Try it on marriage.
Lee Greb
Does one really care. Either a person is in pain or wants to be. So faking it is just another form of communication of need.
ralph.dratman
These people who could not tell fake from real pain probably do not ride in an ambulance or work in an emergency room. I'm guessing those who do work like that see enough people in real pain to know the difference.
Wijnand IJsselsteijn
This resonates well with some of our own work on emotion recognition in humans versus machines, where we found that machines outperform human emotion recognition when recognizing human emotions associated with autobiographical recollection of emotional episodes. For more info, see: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2508630
Bob
Did she moan or did she groan??? I don't care. Often one becomes the other and vice versa. But I would like to know the difference between happy tears and sad ones. Not a good mistake to make.