For example, a fearful face often raises eyebrows and pulls them together, while a surprised face often raises eyebrows and curves them. The team is using psychology research techniques, such as the Facial Action Coding System, which categorizes how individuals move muscles in the face when displaying emotions. Wilkins, Kostopoulos and Azgour co-taught a course at Stanford this year, Symbolic Systems 210: Learning Facial Emotions: Art and Psychology. They plan to conduct facial emotion learning experiments with autistic children this summer. Wilkins is collaborating with Kay Kostopoulos, a lecturer in the Drama Department Michael Azgour, a guest artist in Symbolic Systems and Antonio Hardan, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford University Medical Center and the director of the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Clinic at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt and Picasso display in their portraits their own subtle and ingenious ability to interpret human facial emotions. A powerful portrayal reflects an actor's understanding of what goes on in the face of someone who is joyful, sad or angry. Good actors subtly and accurately portray authentic emotions. When artists draw the face or actors express facial emotions, they capture something that we find significant and that captivates us," Wilkins said. "Historically, the fields that demonstrated the deepest understanding of facial emotions have been drawing and acting. The understanding of facial expressions in art goes back much further than in psychology. A large amount of research now links the behavior of the facial muscles associated with universal emotions to brain states, memory and body physiology. The deeper scientific understanding in psychology of the seven universal facial emotions began in the 1960s, and was pioneered by psychologists such as Paul Ekman. If you don't recognize universal emotions, any type of interpersonal interaction is really hindered," Wilkins said. "In everyday life, the average individual with autism has less than a 50 percent chance of knowing if your expression is happy or sad or angry. People with autism typically don't benefit from this common understanding of facial communication.
They are of fundamental importance in human communication. Wilkins, a lecturer in Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program, is focusing on the seven universal emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust and contempt. His findings will be integrated in an interactive learning environment to train people with autism to better recognize facial emotions. He is studying drawing techniques used by portrait artists, facial mimicry and emotional memory techniques used by actors, and microexpression and subtle expression recognition techniques developed by psychologists.
Stanford researcher David Wilkins is studying how people can be trained to better recognize facial emotions. Sometimes our deepest emotions are written all over our faces. MaScientist studies emotion in psychology, art and acting to help autistics Scientist studies emotion in psychology, art and acting to help autistics | Stanford News Release