I saw Al Gore on “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. He acted like the Lord King Bufu Scientist; such an annoying and passive aggressive twatwaffle.
Speaking of which, here’s Bill Nye, wishing his critics an eventual end:
I’ve never heard of him. But I have heard of the vostok ice core research. The Fukushima earthquake tilted the earth too but who thinks weather changes from that? Crazy conspiracy theorists! They also believe the government has control of the weather too…but there’s no newspapers or declassified documents that say that, is there? Lol
1 Like
Blame Paul Ekman for making this field what it is today. Much of the research in this area builds on the theory of universal emotions, which has caused subsequent research to restrict their datasets to anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. His work suggests that these are the only 7 emotions that remains constant, independent of culture or ethnicity. His work has been applied to mainstream research for over 4 decades. It’s why you see these emotions used in Microsoft’s and Google’s emotion APIs today.
In my estimation, 90% of all research is done by students mentored by established researchers in the field. But all researchers stand on the shoulders of giants. It doesn’t mean that a report which makes it to the mainstream media has any credibility though. Even much of the peer-reviewed research is total junk and is often treated with automatic skepticism within the scientific community.
3 Likes
I saw Al Gore on “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. He acted like the Lord King Bufu Scientist; such an annoying and passive aggressive twatwaffle.
And Daniel Day-Lewis acted like he had Cerebral Palsy in My Left Foot. That doesn’t make him an actual CP patient, though.
This study is talking about emotions detectable by facial expression recognition algos and not basic emotions in general. Facial detection algos work from a framework of 6 or 7 emotions and this study is saying that number can be reduced to 4. I believe Mark is the resident SME and I’d defer to him.
News stories about Science always do some disservice to truth and context… but they gotta get those clicks and keep things simple.
1 Like
I’ll let Dusty explain it to you:
So, now you’re a Dusty fan? Here’s her signature song, The Son of a Preacher Man. “How well I remember, the look that was in his eye, stealing kisses from me on the sly”
There are only four human emotions, and they are all angry; no…There are many human emotions; love, exhilaration, anxiety, empathy, and more. Don’t let these tottering dolts limit the range of your humanity.
Without commenting on the accuracy of the study, I will say that the conclusion reflects what we do know about cognition and emotional response. There are, after all, four primary neurotransmitters commonly associated with emotion - Seratonin, Glutamate, Dopamine, and Norepinephrine. So it doesn’t seem a stretch at all to define four primary emotions, which reasonably could be called the “pure” responses to a single neurotransmitter.
I think the logical jump you are missing, is that the 4 chems never arrive all by themselves - they are always a mixture, and we experience them (as an emotion) through the additional filter of our perception (the sum of experience, and whatever coping mechanisms we’ve built up.)
Consider color. How many colors are there? Your computer monitor can generate millions, and you the human can differentiate differences that make that million colors matter. Yet, color can easily be tracked back to three primary colors. Yellow, Red, and Blue.
So logically, it’s no stretch to accept that the brain is efficient, and accomplishes emotion/cognition using combinations of a few basic neurotransmitters.
1 Like
What about Green?
Primary colors:
Light: Red, green, and blue
Pigment: Red, yellow, blue
Ahhh ok got it … I’m use to seeing them as magenta, yellow, cyan and black…or CMYK
But then again he was talking about computer monitors and I guess that was also a confusion point because that is Red, Green and Blue.
Here’s the study if interested.
Their conclusions have been misrepresented by second hand accounts i.e. the BBC. If you want a computer to detect love, doubt, confusion etc. in somebody’s face, you can do a pretty decent job through some combination of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust facial expressions.
Anywhere in these news articles where you read the word “emotion”, replace it with the word “facial expression”. The authors didn’t think to clarify this in one line of their abstract “to optimize categorization of the six classic emotions” which was all the BBC needed to miss what the authors are actually saying.
If you disagree that facial expressions can’t be reduced to four or six basic categories, fair play, fair play. The point I’m driving at though is that this research is actually about facial expressions and not emotions.
Son of a Preacher Man, great song!
2 Likes
Eric,
Not sure I fully agree, at least with respect to the study and it’s connection to emotion. The authors draw the direct link, referring to “Dynamic Facial Expressions of Emotion” throughout the study.
In a nutshell, they point out that people communicate emotion via facial expressions, then attempt to describe the “language” by reducing it to constituent parts (expressions), and theorize that the fundamental basis of the lexicon, derives from four root emotions.
There are 3 Additive colors, which are light; red, green and blue. There are 4 Subtractive colors which are inks or pigments; yellow, magenta, cyan, and black. Black can be represented as a gray balance of the other 3 colors, but maintaining the balance is difficult, so black is very handy.
The human brain is a pseudo quantum computer, expressed in organic analog hardware. While it grows from a base set of DNA instructions from conception, and the electrical “contacts” are enabled by neurotransmitters, no two human brains operate exactly the same way. There are a myriad of variations.
What the researchers of this study have attempted to do is apply a classic scientific method to categorize human responses: reductionism.
It didn’t turn out well.
It got their study talked about on Talk for at least a week. . . 