The NimStim database was validated by 81 participants, 51 female and 30 male, aged 18–35, with over 70% being European American – a mixture of 34 New Yorkers and 47 undergraduates from a Midwestern US liberal arts college

Validation used a forced-choice method: the participants had to choose one of the eight facial expression terms (‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘fearful’, ‘surprised’, ‘disgusted’, ‘neutral’ and ‘calm’) that the actors had been given, or ‘none of the above’, for each face in the database

I’ll skip over the statistical analysis – mainly because it would take me too long to understand it! – but I see a couple of potentially significant problems

First, as noted in the paper, these are posed photographs

People are pretty bad at judging emotions from context-free still images (see e.g. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25352-6)

And a professional actor portraying a static emotion is likely to produce a relatively unnatural performance

Second, there’s the double empathy problem (https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62639/): specifically, why should Autistic people be expected to read emotions from facial expressions validated by neurotypical people?

Why do I say they were neurotypical?

I can’t be 100% sure, but it’s the word *healthy*: the validators are described as ‘untrained, healthy adult research participants’

Am I wrong to assume that ‘healthy’ is code for neurotypical here?

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#DoubleEmpathy #NimStimDB #FacialExpression