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Recognition of Pain

We have written a great deal about recognizing basic emotions, but what about pain?

Certainly, pain has many similarities with other basic emotions, given its deep evolutionary basis and the universal nature of the pain experience. However, further attention must be paid to how we recognize expressions of pain as opposed to those of other emotions. The ability to recognize when people are in pain is incredibly important in many contexts, and Humintell would like to focus attention on this field as part of September’s Pain Awareness Month.

In a 2017 study, Dr. Daniela Simon of Humboldt University of Berlin and a team of Canadian and British researchers sought to better understand pain recognition by exposing participants to a series of film clips of faces demonstrating either pain or basic emotions. Participants were asked to evaluate these clips and report what emotion was being displayed, in an effort to see if pain is consistently distinguished from other emotions.

Theoretically, Dr. Simon and her team’s research was grounded in the evolutionary history of facial expressions, seeing painful expressions as an effort to communicate pain to onlookers, either to warn them or to ask for help. This fits with our previous blogs on research connecting basic emotions and their related expressions to evolutionary purposes.

Moreover, research in neurobiology has found that pain and its expression is a distinctive and specific neurological event. They contend that both the evolutionary and neurological background of pain fail to give a full picture without exploring how pain is recognized by onlookers.

In order to assess this experimentally, actors were hired to simulate basic emotions and pain expressions, with the resulting videos compared by the researchers to accepted images of the expressions in question. This helped ensure accuracy while also using a dynamic video as opposed to a static photograph.

Participants were asked not only to identify the expression displayed but also to rate the intensity of the emotion and how relaxed or comfortable the displayed person was. This helped delve further than just identifying emotions but also explored interplay between them, such as whether fear and pain tend to coincide, for instance.

Overall, participants regularly distinguished between basic emotions and pain. There was some overlap, such as between fear and pain and between fear and surprise. Moreover, many pain expressions showed disgust, or even surprise, to varying extents. Finally, participants tended to accurately identify pleasant emotions, such as happiness, and unpleasant expressions, such as pain, anger, or fear.

Not only was this study able to make strides in better understanding the recognition of pain, as contrasted to basic emotions, but it helped further develop a prototypical measurement of the pain expression, which is invaluable for further research on recognizing pain.

While understanding how to read people’s emotions is critical, understanding when people are in pain is also a helpful way of communicating with them, both in professional and perhaps especially in personal contexts.

Universal Laughter and Deception

Is laughter recognized in the same way across cultures? And, if so, can we tell if people in different cultures are faking their laughter?

This is exactly what a team of researchers attempted to answer in a recent publication in Psychological Science. An astoundingly large group of 31 researchers sought to analyze reactions to laughter in 21 societies across six regions in the world. Because laughter is practiced in some form in all cultures, they wanted to know if the subtle cues that tell whether the laughter is real or fake also hold universally.

Fundamentally, they hoped to explore what such universality means for early evolutionary uses of laughter, which they see as basically signaling affiliation or a desire to cooperate. Listeners should be able to note whether the laughter was really an effort to signal this affiliation, or if it was false. This is the distinction between genuine spontaneous laughter and non-genuine volitional laughter.

This is not to say that volitional laughter must be deceptive. Instead, volitional laughs can be used to convey the recognition of a need for cooperation or other social cues. The study authors suggest that this is actually the more common usage of volitional or non-genuine laughter.

If laughter has this deep evolutionary grounding, then it should not matter what culture somebody is from for them to be able to make the distinction. Past research has found that spontaneous and volitional laughter are substantively different, after all.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers asked people as far flung as Los Angeles, Central Europe, Iran, India, and Japan to participate in the study, totaling up to 884 participants. These participants were then exposed to audio recordings that contained either spontaneous or volitional laughter and were asked to identify each as either fake or genuine.

Overall, people could reliably make the distinction, noting changes in intensity or higher pitch in the laugh. This all suggests that listeners pick up on subtle emotional variation in laughter. While past research has found that people are good at this within their culture, this is certainly a profound extension.

There is a lot to learn from this study in terms of how to better read people and detect deception. Initially, it is pretty amazing that people are able to note whether the laughter is a lie or not. As we have noted, deception detection relies closely on comparing people’s behavior to their baseline. Thus, the familiarity that assists lie detection is completely lost in those audio clips.

That said, it does fit with previous research finding that people can rank spoken voices accurately based on their intuition that the speaker is likely to commit infidelity.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the way this study helps tie laughter into a sense of universal emotional expression. While joy is a universal basic emotion, laughter need not be synonymous with joy. However, this research helps show us that laughter, like gestures of triumph, can be a universal expression.

Reading Hairstyles?

We focus a lot on reading people’s nonverbal behavior, but is there something to be read into about our hair also?

This is precisely what Humintell’s Drs. David Matsumoto and Hyisung Hwang argue in a recent paper. Essentially, while past research has argued that emotional expressions can reveal one’s culture, they argue that differing hairstyles, which are often culturally-linked, confounds these impressions and significantly shape our identifications of other people’s nationalities.

Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang are responding to past research (Marsh et al., 2003) which found a distinctive “accent” between Japanese national and Japanese-American expressions. Essentially, this research asked participants to identify the subject’s nationality (Japanese or American), based on their facial expression. When participants were able to do this, it was attributed to fundamental cultural differences in the form of expression.

However, this may have ignored striking confounders that are not linked just to the facial expression.

For context, when we see a person’s face, we process a host of information, such as their facial structure, expressions, and other artificial features, like piercings, glasses, or hairstyle. Each of these have important impacts on our assessment that are often hard for researchers to untangle.

It was these artificial features which Drs. Matsumoto and Hwang turned to in their study. Because hairstyles often differ between people in different nations, even if they have cultural ties, they developed an experiment to see if this accounted for past findings.

After collecting almost 200 students, they exposed them to a series of images displaying basic emotional expressions on Japanese faces, including the photographs used in the previous study to divide between Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans. However, half of the photographs were edited to switch hairstyles between the groups, giving Japanese nationals American hairstyles, for instance.

Once the participants were divided between “original” and “switched” groups, participants were shown a series of images and told that some were Japanese nationals and others were Japanese-Americans. Then, upon being shown each image again individually, they were asked to mark the nationality of each.

As hypothesized, hairstyles did impact evaluations for Japanese nationals and reduced the accuracy for Japanese-American neutral expressions. While it is interesting that Japanese-American emotional expressions were not impacted, it is clear that hairstyle plays a significant role.

This necessarily challenges the idea that emotional expressions have a certain “accent” or “cultural dialect.” Instead, many of those differences could be attributed to proclivities to artificial features, like jewelry or hairstyles.

Not only does this demonstrate the importance of universal emotions, as they really are universal, but it also serves as an important lesson for anyone trying to read emotions across cultures. Our brain immediately picks up on these artificial features as it holistically recognizes the face and emotion, so it might take some training to learn to disentangle them!