The Center for Law, Brain & Behavior puts the most accurate and actionable neuroscience in the hands of judges, lawyers, policymakers and journalists—people who shape the standards and practices of our legal system and affect its impact on people’s lives. We work to make the legal system more effective and more just for all those affected by the law.
By Natasha Bray | Nature Reviews Neuroscience “Pain” | January 29, 2015
Pain has sensory and affective components, and can be augmented or attenuated through the cognitive reappraisal of the painful stimulus in a process called ‘self-regulation’. Although the sensory and affective qualities of pain are thought to be tracked by a set of regions throughout the brain that are collectively known as the ‘neurological…
Read the full article, with subscription, on Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
By Jan Hoffman | The New York Times | April 28, 2014
In the image above, can you tell which expressions show real pain and which ones are feigned? A study found that human observers had no better than a 55 percent rate of success, even with training, while a computer was accurate about 85 percent of the time. (The answers: A. Fake. B. Real. C. Real.)
How well can computers interact with humans? Certainly computers play a mean game of chess, which requires strategy and logic, and “Jeopardy!,” in which they must process language to understand the clues read by Alex Trebek (and buzz in with the correct question).
But in recent years, scientists have striven for an even more complex goal: programming computers to read human facial expressions.
Quiz: Are These People in Real Pain or Just Faking It? We all know what it’s like to experience pain that makes our faces twist into a grimace. But can you tell if someone else’s face of pain is real or feigned?
The practical applications could be profound. Computers could supplement or even replace lie detectors. They could be installed at border crossings and airport security checks. They could serve as diagnostic aids for doctors.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have written software that not only detected whether a person’s face revealed genuine or faked pain, but did so far more accurately than human observers.
While other scientists have already refined a computer’s ability to identify nuances of smiles and grimaces, this may be the first time a computer has triumphed over humans at reading their own species. Continue reading »
By Olimpia Zagnoli for the New York Times
Can you detect someone’s emotional state just by looking at his face?
It sure seems like it. In everyday life, you can often “read” what someone is feeling with the quickest of glances. Hundreds of scientific studies support the idea that the face is a kind of emotional beacon, clearly and universally signaling the full array of human sentiments, from fear and anger to joy and surprise.
Increasingly, companies like Apple and government agencies like the Transportation Security Administration are banking on this transparency, developing software to identify consumers’ moods or training programs to gauge the intent of airline passengers. The same assumption is at work in the field of mental health, where illnesses like autism and schizophrenia are often treated in part by training patients to distinguish emotions by facial expression.
But this assumption is wrong. Several recent and forthcoming research papers from the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, which I direct, suggest that human facial expressions, viewed on their own, are not universally understood.
Read the full article by CLBB Faculty and Northeastern University Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett in the New York Times. Published February 28, 2014.
UC Berkeley psychologists and leading facial expression researchers Paul Ekman and Dacher Keltner submitted a response to Feldman Barrett’s research findings on March 11, 2014. Read the letter to the editor here.
Do emotions reside within single regions of the brain? Are thoughts and feelings handled by separate parts of the brain? Is the Justice system using concepts of emotion and cognition that draw from our current understanding of the brain? If you believe CLBB faculty member Lisa Feldman Barrett, the answer to each of these questions is a resounding no. Watch her compelling presentation that could change the way you think about the human mind and its complex relationship with behavior.
This presentation was given in the historic Ether Dome at Mass General Hospital on February 7th, 2013, for the first CLBB-sponsored Grand Rounds of the MGH Department of Psychiatry.
