I guessed “exasperation”…like a mom reacting to some boneheaded act by her teenager.
FWIW I haven’t been a teen for over 20 years.
Startled is exactly what I thought of. But I guess that falls under surprised.
So, I like totally, like got the wrong like answer. Like.
I do not equate clenched teeth with fear, and it sure looks like clenched teeth to me. That’s what first stuck out to me, so I figured anger. The face as a whole doesn’t clearly support that, though. I agree that it doesn’t look like a natural expression.
Immediately upon seeing it in Parade yesterday, I called bullshit on the “100% of adults” got it right. Come on – 100%? Just the responses here belie that contention.
I’m several decades past my teens.
[QUOTE=from the article cited in the OP]
They hooked up 18 children between the ages of 10 and 18 to an fMRI machine and showed them photos of people in different emotional states. When presented with a photo of a woman and asked what emotion she was registering, 100% of the adults said “fear,” which was correct. Only 50% of the teenagers correctly identified that emotion.
[/QUOTE]
Hmmm… How many of those 18 children between the ages of 10 and 18 were adults? 
And how many were teenagers?
I hate authors who make it look like they are writing intelligently, when actually there are logic flaws and math flaws all over. 
There’s not enough information about how the test worked. Were the subjects given a list of emotions to choose from? Did the teenagers answer surprised instead of scared? An unpleasant surprise would be about the same as fear. Did they answer ‘I don’t know’?
Teenagers also tend to be all over the place in surveys anyway. They tend to make up an answer, deliberately answer wrong, give the answer they think the interviewer is looking for, or answer some other question that they find more interesting. The interesting data to derive is about the tendency of scientists to believe that significant data can be derived from surveying teenagers.
I thought her facelift was too tight.
They said there were only 18 children, and didn’t say how many adults. Maybe there were two.
I don’t think 18 children is a good sample size statistically to predict the whole population. Such a study might be valuable if individual reactions were studied to learn how people reach certain conclusions, but as a statistic it is worthless.
I thought she was shocked at how poor a job her dentist did on her teeth or the beautician did on her dark roots.
Shibb “Not a teenager since 1982” Oleth
18 is usually more than enough for an fMRI study. The machine is not cheap to run either, so they don’t try to get more. There are plenty of statistical conniptions you can to do maximize statistical power.
No, that’s totally the “I am going to pull your dick off, you shithead!” face. Don’t ask me how I know this.
They are expecting us to believe that based on a sample size of fewer than 18 teenagers (and no idea how many adults), that teenagers are poorer than adults at recognizing emotions in facial expressions. The fMRI aspect was just to figure out what part of the brain is active when trying to do so. This might be strong enough to correlate performance on the trial to brain activity but I still don’t think the results can be generalized to say that only half of all teenagers can identify emotions by facial expression.
A scared person would have a more furrowed brow and the teeth wouldn’t be gritted together. The mouth should be open.
Looks like a terrible picture of a terrible actress. It doesn’t prove anything because she’s not actually scared.
(Gary T, I didn’t read any of the replies here before I posted, but I’m happy to see that you and I agree.)
If someone is gritting teeth they are angry, not scared.
I’m pretty sure she is actually scared. Psychologists have plenty of images of people exhibiting actual emotions; there’s no reason they would use a staged one, especially since it doesn’t look like they took a new photo for this test.
I suspect that they deliberately chose a picture of someone who is not showing a stereotypical fear expression. That’s sort of the point–people don’t always show emotions in exactly the same way, but we (most of us, anyway, at least as adults) can still read what another person is feeling.
Furthermore, that’s almost certainly not how the woman would appear if you were watching her. That’s not a face that anyone would naturally hold for any amount of time. She’s in the midst of reacting, and the only way to see that expression is to freeze it as a photograph.
If you’ve seen many pictures of people talking, you know that we contort our faces in all sorts of weird ways, but we don’t notice it until we see a face unnaturally frozen mid-word. She may even be speaking in that photo. They could have caught her exclaiming, “Oh shit!” I imagine if you saw a video of her reaction it would look a lot more normal.
I thought maybe it was fear, but it reads a lot more like a very, very exasperated mother who is this close to not caring whether the homicide is justifiable or not.
So this is all about a machine that can read peoples minds? There’s a sucker born every minute. This is proof that the machine, scientists, and journalists are all dumber than teenagers.
Looks to me like she just noticed her kid sticking his finger in an electrical socket or somesuch. So a mixture of fear and surprise and ‘not enough time to act’ - but mostly ‘sudden fear’.
Maybe some of the disagreement about interpretation stems from whether you consider that you’re the object of her reaction.