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Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Read Animal Emotions?

As technology advances, scientists from around the globe have been investigating the use of AI to help recognize animal pain signals.

Through computerized facial expression analysis, this AI technology can quickly and accurately recognize pain signals in animals. In some cases, AI is better at this task than some humans!

This AI technology has been used in animals from sheep to horses to cats.

An example includes the Intellipig System developed by scientists at the University of the West of England Bristol (UWE) and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC).

Intellipig examines photos of pigs’ faces and notifies farmers if there are signs of pain, sickness, or emotional distress.

Facial Expressions in Animals

Scientists assess an animal’s level of pain by looking for telltale muscle movements around the eyes, ears, and other facial features. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems make similar judgments by measuring the distance between “landmarks” on the face (orange and teal dots).

Like humans, animals convey how they’re feeling through their facial expressions. In fact, humans share 38% of our facial movements with dogs, 34% with cats and 47% with primates and horses.

But, as an article in Science points out, “the anatomical similarities don’t mean we can read animals’ faces like those of fellow humans. So, researchers studying animal communication often infer what an animal is experiencing through context”.

An example of this is pain; researchers studying animals can induce mild discomfort or be cognizant of pain signals after an invasive procedure such as castration.

After spending countless hours observing the faces of animals in painful or stressful situations, scientists can then compare them against animals who are pain or stress-free.

As a result, scientists developed “grimace scales” which provide a measure of how much pain or stress an animal is experiencing based on movement of its facial muscles.

In addition, like the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) used on humans, experts have also become skilled at coding facial movements in animals (AnimalFACS).

Amazingly at present, the FACS system has been adapted into 8 different species and their manuals are freely accessible through the animalfacs.com website:

  • ChimpFACS: common chimpanzees
  • MaqFACE: rhesus macaques
  • GibbonFACS: hylobatid species
  • OrangFACS: orangutans
  • DogFACS: domestic dogs
  • CatFACS: cats
  • EquiFACS: domestic horses
  • CalliFACS: marmoset species

However, coding work is incredibly tedious, and human coders need 2 to 3 hours to code 30 seconds of video.

This is where AI comes in.

AI can do the same task almost instantaneously, but first it must be taught.

Teaching AI to Read Animal Faces

AI systems are becoming faster and more accurate than humans at determining whether an animal is in pain. That’s partly because they can identify the tiniest muscle movements and find new indicators of pain that humans are not even aware of.

At the University of Haifa, scientists Anna Zamansky and her team have been using AI to pinpoint the subtle signs of discomfort in animals’ faces.

There are many steps in teaching AI to read animal faces.

These steps include:

  1. AI learning to ID parts of the face crucial to creating expressions (this is done by manually flagging important parts of the face associated with specific muscle movements).
  2. Feeding AI a plethora of landmarked photos to teach it to find landmarks on its own.
  3. AI identifying specific facial expressions by analyzing distances between landmarks.
  4. Cross referencing expressions against grimace scales to determine signs of pain or distress.

Zamansky’s team trained their AI on photos of Labrador retrievers who were either eagerly anticipating a treat or were able to see the treat but were prevented from reaching it.

Their AI was able to successfully detect whether the dog was happy or frustrated 89% of the time.

The AI also successfully differentiated happy and frustrated horses in the same experiment.

Despite some limitations to their technology, Zamansky’s team is about to release an AI based app that will allow cat owners to scan their pets’ faces for 30 seconds and get easy to read messages.

The technology also extends to horses- researchers in the Netherlands have developed a similar app that scans resting horses’ faces and bodies to estimate their pain levels.

This app could potentially be used in equestrian competitions to improve animal welfare and fairness in the sport.

The post Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Read Animal Emotions? first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.

Why Laughter is Good for the Soul and Your Health

A recent review published last year in the journal Plos One found that spontaneous laughter leads to health benefits.

The article combined the results from eight separate studies to answer the question: Does spontaneous laughter reduce cortisol levels?

What is Cortisol?

Cortisol is an essential hormone that affects almost every organ and tissue in your body.

It’s produced by the adrenal glans and plays many important roles, including: maintaining blood pressure, supporting immune function, boosting metabolism, and helping you stay awake.

When you are under stress, your body produces more cortisol; therefore, it is a good measure of stress levels. Too much cortisol can lead to weight gain, digestive problems, muscle weakness, depression, and anxiety.

Universal Laughter and Deception

Laughter as Medicine

Since the 1970s, medical experts have learned that laughter can boost pain tolerance and improve overall well-being.

This recent meta-analysis identified eight studies in which participants were encouraged to laugh by watching a funny video, working with a laughter therapist, or participating in a self-administered laughter program.

Some of the studies measured participants’ cortisol levels before and after a laughter session and others included control groups, which measured cortisol levels of participants without laughter.

Combining the data, researchers found that cortisol levels fell by 31.9% for people who participated in laughter interventions — and even a single laughter session led to a 36.7% reduction in cortisol. It didn’t matter how long participants laughed; any laughter led to reductions in cortisol.

Their analysis concluded that “spontaneous laughter is associated with greater reduction in cortisol levels as compared with usual activities, suggesting laughter as a potential adjunctive medical therapy to improve well-being.”

Other Health Benefits of Laughter

universal laughter and deceptionThis recent review builds on previous research that has found that laughter can improve your overall health, well-being, and life satisfaction.

Here are few studies and benefits of laughter:

  • A 2018 review found that laughter and humor interventions appear to enhance well-being in older adults.
  • Laughter is also found to improve mental health and bolster personal development.
  • Evidence suggests that laughter helps improve cardiovascular health.
  • Laughter can decrease pain perception. One study found that laughter therapy reduced pain scores of people living with terminal cancer by nearly half.

The take-home message: Laughter is good medicine, and there is data to prove it. So do your best to find opportunities to laugh and giggle as often as possible.

The post Why Laughter is Good for the Soul and Your Health first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.

A Pocketbook Guide to the Basics of Emotion

We’re excited to announce the launch of The Humintell Emotion Primer – a pocketbook guide to the basics of emotion.

It’s a little book that we put together that summarizes and describes some of the major points about emotions, especially about the basic emotions that we talk about in our work and that we’ve studied and written about for decades.

This Emotion Primer starts with a little introduction and it has 7 sections– each dealing with an important aspect about what makes emotion special.

1. The first section defines an emotion from our perspective. This is so important because in our experience, most debates and arguments about emotion occur because of differences in people‘s definitions of emotion and we think it’s always important to let people know what our definition of emotion is.

2. The second section describes the various types of emotions that exist and focuses on basic emotions. Research over the past half century plus has shown that basic emotions have features that other emotions don’t have. Now, humans have a lot of different emotions and some people have suggested that we don’t believe that other emotions are emotions. Of course we do! It’s just that basic emotions are a special class or category of emotion.

3. The third section talks about those features of basic emotions that distinguish them from other types of emotion. Remember, these features have been demonstrated in decades of research.

4. The fourth section talks about the differences between emotions and feelings. This is important because many people confuse them and use those terms interchangeably in our everyday lives.

5. The fifth section is on our affective world and distinguishes emotions from other phenomena that are emotional, like moods, personalities, and psychopathologies. This is also important because many of us don’t distinguish between emotion and other affective phenomena.

6. The sixth section lists the elicitors and functions of each of the seven basic emotions. This section is really important to understand the differences among them and to gain an appreciation of why emotions were important in the history of humans and in our every day lives today.

7. The seventh section has examples of each of the seven universal facial expressions along with a summary listing of the points that are mentioned in the other sections.

8. At the end, there’s a QR code that you can also scan and that leads you to a place on our website where we have all kinds of additional readings, blogs, and videos about emotions that we’ve done in the past. This section should round out this program well with additional insights and examples.

If you put it all together, there’s a lot of information about emotions that start with this little primer and then point us in different directions.

In the end, this primer is not a novel or a long and boring scientific treatise, but it does have very quick descriptions of the most important aspects of emotions.

This is exactly the same kind of information that anyone who wants to improve their knowledge and understanding of emotion should access.

We really hope you enjoy it. Get a Humintell Emotion Primer for yourself!

The post A Pocketbook Guide to the Basics of Emotion first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.