Can you tell the difference between a genuine smile and one masking frustration? We aren't always conscious of the expressions we make in certain situations, which puts us at a disadvantage to computer programs that understand our facial expressions better than we do.
Ehsan Hoque, a graduate student in MIT's Affective Computing Group, led a new study designed to improve the way computers read and understand human faces. The team placed volunteers in front of webcams and asked them to act out various emotions, from delight to frustration. Then subjects were asked to fill out an online form designed to elicit frustration (darn thing kept deleting their data when they hit "Submit") while the webcam recorded their expressions. When asked to act out frustration, 90 percent of the subjects did not smile, but when provided with that obnoxious data-erasing form, 90 percent of them did smile.
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