Posted May 10, 2018 07:30:51 When people have facial expressions, it’s important to know exactly what they’re feeling.
“They may feel like they’re angry or upset,” said Dr. Stephanie Zahn, associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.
“But they don’t actually know what’s going on in their bodies.
We need to figure out what’s causing that emotion.”
So Zahn and her colleagues developed a face recognition system that can identify facial expressions and make them more likely to be perceived as positive or negative.
It’s called a facial feedback theory, or FCNT.
“In order to get accurate, accurate data on the facial expressions of people, it needs to be able to be trained and then be able, through repeated training, to detect the facial expression of that person,” said Zahn.
In the lab, Zahn’s group trained its FCNT system on a series of facial expressions.
These included smiling, frowning, and laughing.
“It can also distinguish between smiling and frowning,” Zahn said.
“We trained the system on faces from people that were smiling and people that weren’t smiling, and it would identify smiles, frowns, and laughter as positive.”
The team also trained the FCNT on faces that were neutral, neutral and negative.
“It’s like, well, we can distinguish between happy and sad, smiling and sad,” said Jennifer Lee, a graduate student in psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
“And the FCNT is a very robust system.
It can distinguish a smile, a frown, or a frown.
That’s pretty impressive.”
Lee said the FCNNT system also can differentiate between people who have smiles, and people who don’t.
“I think it’s going to be very helpful in the future in medical research,” she said.
In other words, when you see someone smiling, you might be surprised to learn that the person actually smiles.
It might be that a person with a positive facial expression is just being themselves, and not judging you based on your facial expression.
Zahn believes FCNT could also be useful in other areas of psychology.
“People’s emotions might be different than what they think they are,” she added.
“Maybe we can have this system that allows us to tell people how their emotions are.”
And with that, the FCT could soon be available to doctors in the U.S. Zuhn’s team is also working on a facial expression recognition system for medical patients.
It could also work in a lab environment, she said, so it’s possible that it could be used in research.
“When I’m working in a laboratory setting, I have to be careful that I don’t overuse it.
If I start using it too much, I end up overtraining it, which leads to overtraining,” she explained.
“If I start overtraining and overusing it, then I’m probably going to overtrain and overuse that system and the results will not be very good.”
For now, Zuhns team is focused on developing the system in the lab.
“Our goal is to build it into a device that is used in a clinical setting,” she told CBC News.
“Then it could eventually be used by people in hospitals.”
