揽瓜阁俱乐部第二期 Day8 2020.06.22
【人文科学-情绪】 Do not rely on facial expressions for how people are feeling （591字 精读 必做篇）
Aristotle reckoned the face was a window onto a person’s mind. Cicero agreed. Two millennia on, facial expressions are still commonly thought to be a universally valid way to gauge other people’s feelings, irrespective of age, sex and culture. A raised eyebrow suggests confusion. A smile denotes happiness. A frown indicates sadness.
Or do they? An analysis of hundreds of research papers that examined the relationship between facial expressions and underlying emotions has uncovered a surprising conclusion: there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that there are such things as recognisable facial expressions for basic emotions which are universal across cultures. Just because a person is not smiling, the researchers found, does not mean that person is unhappy.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett, one of the authors of the study, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, told the AAAS meeting in Seattle, “We surprised ourselves”. Dr Feldman Barrett is a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and along with her colleagues she found that, on average, adults in urban cultures scowled when they were angry 30% of the time. Which meant that some 70% of the time they did not scowl when angry. Instead, they did something else with their faces. People also scowled when they were not angry. “They scowl when they’re concentrating, they scowl when someone tells them a bad joke, they scowl when they have gas, they scowl for lots of reasons,” says Dr Feldman Barrett.
A scowl, the researchers concluded, is certainly one expression of anger. But it is not the only way people express that emotion. The ambiguous nature of facial expressions was not restricted to anger, but seemed valid for all six of the emotional categories that they examined: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.
All this raises questions about the efforts of information-technology companies to develop artificial-intelligence algorithms which can recognise facial expressions and work out a person’s underlying emotional state. Microsoft, for example, claims its “Emotion api” is able to detect what people are feeling by examining video footage of them. Another of the study’s authors, however, expressed scepticism. Aleix Martinez, a computer engineer at Ohio State University, said that companies attempting to extract emotions from images of faces have failed to understand the importance of context.
For a start, facial expression is but one of a number of non-verbal cues, such as body posture, that people use to communicate with each other. Machine recognition of emotion needs to take account of these as well. But context can reach further than that. Dr Martinez cited an experiment in which participants were shown a close-up picture of a man’s face, which was bright red with his mouth open in a scream.
Based on this alone, most participants said the man was extremely angry. Then the view zoomed out to show a football player with his arms outstretched, celebrating a goal. His angry-looking face was, in fact, a show of pure joy.
Given that people cannot guess each other’s emotional states most of the time, Dr Martinez sees no reason computers would be able to. “There are companies right now claiming to be able to do that and apply this to places I find really scary and dangerous, for example, in hiring people,” he says. “Some companies require you to submit a video cv, and then this is analysed by a machine-learning system. And depending on your facial expressions, they hire you or not, which I find really stunning and not only based on the wrong hypothesis, but a dangerous hypothesis.”
Source: The Economist
【人文科学-情绪】 Real Laughs Motivate More Guffaws （437字 2分42秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
"I thought you were downstair boxing chocolates." "Oh, they kicked me out of there. I kept pinching them to see what kind they were."[CLIP: I Love Lucy with laugh track]
Laugh tracks in television shows like I Love Lucy have been encouraging us to chuckle since the 1950s. But they originated even before that with old radio shows.
“If you just put out a comedy program on the radio, people didn’t necessarily realize it was supposed to be funny. So they started recording them with a live audience because then people had all the cues that they would get if they were at the theaters, say—of an audience response. And, indeed, laughter can be highly contagious.”
Sophie Scott is a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. She and her team wondered whether adding laughter to a joke could also make it seem funnier. So they scoured the Internet for the most groan-worthy jokes they could find and enlisted the help of a professional comedian to record them.
“So things like ‘What’s the best day for cooking? Friday. How does a dinosaur pay its bills? Using tyrannosaurus checks,’ that kind of thing.And then we got people to rate how funny they were without any laughter added.”
The researchers paired the jokes with both spontaneous, involuntary laughter and with laughter that had been produced on demand.
"What do you recieve when you ask a lemon for help? Lemon aid."[CLIP: Lemonade joke with laughter]
They played these recordings to adults, some neurotypical and some on the autism spectrum.
“The main thing that we found was that the people with autism and the neurotypical controls were both influenced by laughter in the same way. So everybody found that the more intense the laughter, the funnier that made the joke. So everybody’s rating the jokes as even funnier when they’re paired with spontaneous laughter.”
That is, honest, involuntary laughter cued people to perceive the jokes as funnier more than fake, forced laughter did. And that result was universal: “I think we were expecting there to be some differences for the people with autism, and we did not find them.”
But autistic participants did find the jokes funnier overall.
“And I think what we’re seeing here is that the people with autism are more generous in their assessment of the jokes, I suspect, although that’s just one interpretation.”
The study appears in the journal Current Biology.
In future laughter experiments, the researchers plan to scan participants’ brains to better understand the neural systems responsible for tickling our funny bones. When they do, they may discover that dogs can’t operate an MRI machine, but CAT scan.
Source: Scientific American
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-6-21 20:28:22
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