Humans are Weird

[moon_custafer]

This game, found via littlefluffy.com, seems to have been designed by psych students at McGill, and is one of several supposed to improve your self-esteem by training you to focus on smiling rather than frowning faces.

What fascinates/disturbs me is that in playing it I realized that I can read words way faster than I can identify facial expressions. Mind you, this may be partly visual - the names were written in nice legible dark-blue-on white, whereas the faces were tiny photos. After a while it helped to tell myself to stop trying to interpret expressions and just click on the beige or brown blobs with white dashs across the centre (teeth) and not on the plain blobs (no visible teeth, therefore not smiling).

I don't think this will actually help my social skills.

Comments

Think fast!

[(Anonymous)]

But Sarah, you can read faster than you (or most other people) can do *anything*.

Anyway, this game is lame. All such things are usually a bust because of the fallacy of thinking that people who have trouble interpretting facial expressions are just lacking experience in doing so so if you just flip a few thousand annotated pictures past them they'll gain it.

But, of course, if one *has* the slightest ability to learn through experience you wouldn't have this problem to begin with as you've been looking at faces for decades. I myself can't think of a single thing, from chewing my food without choking to breathing while exercising to moving my arms when I walk, that I've learned through experience. There are many other, better ways of learning things anyway but in this case the problem with getting "experienced" people to admit that their way isn't the One True Only Way is severe.

I've heard of an emotional facial expression notation used in CGI cartoons that sounds nice but I think it's proprietary.

/Don

Re: Think fast!

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know all that - I'm just thinking this game might actually worsen social skills, since the most effective way to play it (for me anyway) is to make oneself *not* see the faces as faces, but as abstract shapes. I'm amused at the naiveté. Actually, since these people appear to be the doctors/researchers of the future, I'm a little frightened by the naiveté.