Can You Tell when Someone’s Faking Pain?
By Susan E. Matthews, Everyday Health
One of these photos was taken when the woman's arm was submerged in ice water, causing her to feel real pain. In the other, her arm is in warm water, and she's been told to make a pained expression. Which is real, and which is fake?
Made your guess? Here's the truth - image B depicts real pain, while A is the fake. But if you're like most people, your ability to tell the difference was pretty close to a pure 50-50 guess. Fortunately, computers can do a better job, correctly identifying the faker 85 percent of the time, according to a study published today in Current Biology.
You already know that it's easier to understand how a person is actually feeling when talking in person than when on the phone or over email. As humans, our faces (and body language) constantly provide subtle clues and context to the words coming out of our mouths, via spontaneous facial expressions that come when we experience emotion.
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Unfortunately, as humans, we've also figured out how to trick this system. In addition to the spontaneous facial expressions we can't control, we've gotten very good at controlling our voluntary facial expressions. Sometimes this is a good thing, helping us laugh along when a friend's joke isn't actually funny, or putting on a strong face for your kids during a crisis. But even though it may help in social situations, researchers from the University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto are interested in figuring out how to know when an expression is genuine or faked. In the medical realm, researchers think recognizing genuine pain could be a helpful tool in identifying people who fake pain to get prescription narcotics. It could help in many other scenarios, too, from job to airport screenings.
First, the researchers tried to figure out if humans themselves could actually pick out the fakers. They created videos of people faking pain while putting their arms in warm water, or actually experiencing pain while having their arms in cold water, and then asked people to pick which was which. The 170 people who tried did almost no better than chance, correctly identifying the fakers only 51.9 percent of the time. Even after being shown some photos that identified the fakers as training, people still didn't do much better - identifying 55 percent correctly instead of 51.9 percent.
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So instead, the researchers turned to computers. Specifically, they turned to the Computer Expression Recognition Toolbox, which can analyze facial muscle movement, and tasked it with identifying patterns that differed between fakers and non-fakers. They realized the main differences were found in eyebrow position, lip position, mouth openings, and the tightness of the lower lids. The computer was then able to correctly identify 85 percent of the fakers.
What are the key differences? According to the computer program, the main thing to look for is how the mouth is moving. Apparently, fakers open their mouths at regular intervals, while people in real pain open their mouths less overall, and do so randomly. Lowered brows and pressed lips also indicated true pain.
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This is one of the first times computers have competently recognized human emotion, the researchers noted. "This is a significant milestone for machine vision systems because although computers have long outperformed humans at logic processes (such as playing chess), they have significantly underperformed compared to humans at perceptual processes, rarely reaching even the level of a human child," they wrote in the paper.
This may sound like the singularity is nigh, but considering the dire state of prescription painkiller abuse, that may just be a good thing.
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This article originally appeared on EverydayHealth.com: Can You Tell When Someone's Faking Pain? A Computer Can
