Today’s Parade Magazine had an article on the teen brain. To show how teen brains are different, they had a photo of a woman as a test. Supposedly, 100% of adults guessed her emotion correctly, but only 50% of teens did. It seems I’m not part of that 100%. Honestly, I don’t know. :dubious: Is she scared, upset, frustrated or did a flash go off in her face? Anyone know? Anyone else confused?
Main article, if interested:
She looks startled to me, but is that an emotion?
It wasn’t clear immediately to me, but once I thought about it I guessed correctly. I bet you do too. Pick one. You don’t have to be sure, just pick one. Got it?
According to the text in the article (second paragraph under the heading Why Is He So Quick To Flip Out?) the correct answer is scared. Did you get it right?
The answer is fear.
Yep, she’s scared.
Thanks for the link to a very interesting article. 
What else could it be? Those teenagers were just being the little pricks they are when they gave a contrary answer.
Seriously, in what way is the emotion on that face not perfectly clear to anyone?
I had no idea. And I haven’t been a teenager since the Nixon administration. The first one. I went with anger, but I was frankly guessing.
I was less than sure myself, but ended up going with the right answer. It kind of looks like deranged anger, to me, too. She just looks a bit crazy to me, like the expression is forced or exaggerated or something–it doesn’t look real.
The six “classical” emotions are:
Happy
Sad
Fear
Anger
Surprise
Disgust
So yes it exists, under surprise.
Whether these are in fact discrete categories, or whether there are more than six is still debated in the literature.
Her face looks more forced than genuine. She reminds me of Marty Feldman. The article doesn’t give any information about how that was done so I’ll reserve judgment until I see the actual study.
<— Not a teenager.
I thought it looked more like the over-reacting super stressed out face. Kind of like a silent face you would make to your coworker to convey “Yarg! This is not working! So irritated”
So, I got it wrong.
I immediately knew it was fear, as did my husband.
I asked my teenaged son and he thought it was surprise.
Looked like a bad interpretation of fear to me. Her eyes looked fearful but her mouth had a funny set.
What an awful website. Ads to the right, ad on the bottom (that doesn’t move yet), ads on the top. About 1/4 of the page actual reading the rest ads. While I recognized her emotion, Parade gets the emotion of digust for their website design
Ha! I thought it was a woman being driven nuts by her teen-aged kid.
Exactly! The mouth and eyes don’t look right together.
Well, I’m 55 years old and I got it wrong. I considered fear, but went with surprised, based on the eyebrows.
I guessed fear right away, then started second-guessing myself, then decided it was probably fear after all.
I said a mixture of fear and disgust. Maybe because the person in the photo was acting?
Not acting, overacting. I guessed that she was horrified. That’s a subset of fear, right?
I’m 53 and I thought she looked outraged. She looks like she’s about to tell her teenage son that he is never allowed to drive her car AGAIN! Because that’s just how my mom looked when she said it to me.
