Can you spot a fake smile?

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Here's a little test to see how good you are at spotting fake and genuine smiles. You look at 20 brief videos of people smiling and then you choose whether they're fake. I did pretty well at it. I judged correctly 18 out of 20. Kind of makes me wonder whether I'm really an aspie, since it seems to be the stereotype that aspies are bad at judging these kinds of things. So that's why I'm coming to you guys: to see how good aspies are at judging and discerning emotions through facial features.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/ ... ndex.shtml

I was able to recognise 12 smiles properly.

All right now I'm annoyed.

I just marked fake on them all, heheheh.

I can't take the test because it doesn't work on a Mac.

15/20. I thought it was pretty easy to discern, actually.

Not too bad. I think some people are harder to detect than others. I got that Asian girl wrong. I was kinda iffy, wasn't sure whether it was real or fake, but the Asian eyes screwed me up. The eyes are usually the indicator of how genuine the smile is... but she has these tiny little Asian eyes and I thought maybe I didn't get that information because they tend to be inscrutable. Oh well. And the blond guy at the beginning... I thought that was genuine and he was fake. So I made a few false positives.

10. I'm pretty bad at that stuff.

11/20...and here i thought i was a good judge of things like this.

You got 14 out of 20 correct

Look at the labels below each image to see which smiles are genuine and which are fake.

Ticks and crosses show which smiles you got right and wrong.

Click on the image if you want to see the smile again.



Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling.

Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain.

Fake smiles can be performed at will, because the brain signals that create them come from the conscious part of the brain and prompt the zygomaticus major muscles in the cheeks to contract. These are the muscles that pull the corners of the mouth outwards.

Genuine smiles, on the other hand, are generated by the unconscious brain, so are automatic. When people feel pleasure, signals pass through the part of the brain that processes emotion. As well as making the mouth muscles move, the muscles that raise the cheeks – the orbicularis oculi and the pars orbitalis – also contract, making the eyes crease up, and the eyebrows dip slightly.

Lines around the eyes do sometimes appear in intense fake smiles, and the cheeks may bunch up, making it look as if the eyes are contracting and the smile is genuine. But there are a few key signs that distinguish these smiles from real ones. For example, when a smile is genuine, the eye cover fold - the fleshy part of the eye between the eyebrow and the eyelid - moves downwards and the end of the eyebrows dip slightly.

Scientists distinguish between genuine and fake smiles by using a coding system called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which was devised by Professor Paul Ekman of the University of California and Dr Wallace V. Friesen of the University of Kentucky.

i did poorly :\ i think im pretty good spotting fake smiles in real life though.
I also think i took this before but i cant remember >_<

You got 15 out of 20 correct.

Not bad at all.

14

but I didn't really understand the concept of a "fake" smile until I read the results page.

Add 1d3 cynicism bonus to point total.

I still wonder how they could capture and indicate the real and the fake smiles. What were the settings? If it's a real smile, wouldn't it be hard just putting it down like that?

How did the thing work?
Ah, the frustration.

I'm sorry that test is a joke.

Because the smiles are not fake or genuine to begin with.
They are an actors 'rendition' of fake or genuine smiling, not actual fake or genuine smiling.

For the test to be accurate people would have to unknowingly be video taped in their smiling habits and then disclose honestly 'what they were thinking' and 'what type of smiles they were giving or attempting to give'

Only then is it accurate in my opinion.

I didn't mean that in an insulting way.

I mean, video starts, person gets the que to give one or the other 'types' of smiles. They are not actually giving the smiles. Does that make sense?