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Humintell Director Dr. Matsumoto sat down with photographer Kris Davidson for an interview at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco California. Produced for an MFA level documentary photography course, Dr. Matsumoto shares valuable insights on the potential of a photograph to serve as a reliable document of truth.
For the first time ever, scientists in Sweden and Norway have simulated how our emotional expressions appear to the dewy eyes of a newborn — and their finding may lay to rest a longstanding debate.
“We have for many years known that newborn babies have poor eyesight, they do not discriminate colors and that [they] have very low visual acuity,” Dr. Svein Magnussen, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oslo in Norway and co-author of the study, told The Huffington Post in an email. “We now know that newborn infants may be able to see and possibly react to human faces and human facial expressions. That has been a debate in development psychology.”
For the study, the researchers produced moving images of adult faces expressing various emotions and filtered out the visual information that newborn infants can’t perceive, The Telegraph reported. The researchers decided what to filter out based on previous studies that indicated how young infants perceive structure, contrast, spacing, and other visual cues.The researchers showed the images to 48 adults to determine whether they could perceive the expressions after some of the visual data had been eliminated.
“We took those data and created dynamic images with the bad resolution and contrast of newborn infants and reasoned that if an adult human subject could make out what was presented, a newborn child could, in principle, do it too,” study co-author Prof. Claes von Hofsten, a psychology professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, told The Huffington Post in an email. “However, if an adult could not make out what was shown, a newborn could not do it either.”
What did the researchers find? The adults correctly identified expressions in three out of four faces when viewing them at a distance of 30 centimeters (or nearly one foot). Based on how well the adults could make out emotions in the simulations, the researchers concluded that infants as young as two days old also could see their parents’ expressions at a distance of about 30 centimeters, which is about the same distance between a breastfeeding mother and her nursing baby.
But when the distance increased, the rate of identifying expressions dropped to about what the researchers would expect from random testing — which suggests that babies’ vision is too blurry to perceive expressions beyond that distance.
The researchers noted that they only examined what newborn infants can see and not whether they are able to make sense of it. Therefore, more research is needed to determine whether newborns understand — and can imitate — facial expressions.
“Our position is: Now a piece of the foundation is in place. If anyone else wants to follow up, that’s up to them,” Magnussen said in a written statement.
The study was published in the November 2014 issue of the Journal of Vision.
Photo courtesy of MeditationMusic.net
If you can’t tell a smile from a scowl, you’re probably not getting enough sleep.
A new UC Berkeley study shows that sleep deprivation dulls our ability to accurately read facial expressions. This deficit can have serious consequences, such as not noticing that a child is sick or in pain, or that a potential mugger or violent predator is approaching.
“Recognizing the emotional expressions of someone else changes everything about whether or not you decide to interact with them, and in return, whether they interact with you,” said study senior author Matthew Walker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley. The findings were published today in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“These findings are especially worrying considering that two-thirds of people in the developed nations fail to get sufficient sleep,” Walker added.
Indeed, the results do not bode well for countless sleep-starved groups, said study lead author Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, who started the study as a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley.
“Consider the implications for students pulling all-nighters, emergency-room medical staff, military fighters in war zones and police officers on graveyard shifts,” she said.
For the experiment, 18 healthy young adults viewed 70 facial expressions that ranged from friendly to threatening, once after a full night of sleep, and once after 24 hours of being awake. Researchers scanned participants’ brains and measured their heart rates as they looked at the series of visages.
Brain scans as they carried out these tasks – generated through functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) – revealed that the sleep-deprived brains could not distinguish between threatening and friendly faces, specifically in the emotion-sensing regions of the brain’s anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex.
Additionally, the heart rates of sleep-deprived study participants did not respond normally to threatening or friendly facial expressions. Moreover, researchers found a disconnection in the neural link between the brain and heart that typically enables the body to sense distress signals.
“Sleep deprivation appears to dislocate the body from the brain,” said Walker. “You can’t follow your heart.”
As a consequence, study participants interpreted more faces, even the friendly or neutral ones, as threatening when sleep-deprived.
“They failed our emotional Rorschach test,” Walker said. “Insufficient sleep removes the rose tint to our emotional world, causing an overestimation of threat. This may explain why people who report getting too little sleep are less social and more lonely.”
On a more positive note, researchers recorded the electrical brain activity of the participants during their full night of sleep, and found that their quality of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) or dream sleep correlated with their ability to accurately read facial expressions. Previous research by Walker has found that REM sleep serves to reduce stress neurochemicals and soften painful memories.
“The better the quality of dream sleep, the more accurate the brain and body was at differentiating between facial expressions,” Walker said. “Dream sleep appears to reset the magnetic north of our emotional compass. This study provides yet more proof of our essential need for sleep.”