On 4/6/2011 3:28 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/6/2011 14:07, Kevin Wampler wrote:
>> posted to be pretty easy (only missed 3).
>
> I got 22, which was the low end of normal.
>
> I have to wonder how they got people to act suspicious or surprised or
> something for the photo. I'm not sure you can take an actor's portrayal
> of an emotion and then judge someone else on how well they can recognize
> the subconscious bits of it.
>

The situation under which using actors wouldn't be valid would be if 
there were people who had significantly more trouble reading eyes of 
actors but had no more trouble than normal for "true" facial expressions 
(or vice versa).  This seems possible, but I'd be quite surprised if it 
had a statistical effect at the same level as overall face reading 
ability, so I don't think that the test is invalidated by this concern 
so long as you rate people on a relative to each other, rather than on 
an absolute scale.

Also, here's how I think they got the photos.  They had actors come into 
the studio and perform a set of pre-chosen facial expressions.  Each 
expression was photographed and the eyes extracted.  These photos were 
then given to a panel for four judges, who decided upon a word 
describing the internal mental state of the actor.  Only those photos 
for which the panel reached unanimous agreement were used.  At least 
that's the best I've been able to figure from reading the research paper 
on which the initial form of the test was based.

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