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Facial Features Underlying the Decoding of Pain Expressions
Caroline Blais1, Daniel Fiset1, Hana Furumoto-Deshaies1
1Department of Psychoeducation and Psychology, University of Québec in Outaouais, Canada.
The Journal of Pain
|January 15, 2019
Summary
People focus more on affective facial pain cues (brow lowering, nose wrinkling) than sensory ones (eyes narrowing), even when asked to focus on sensory aspects. This highlights a bias in how we interpret pain expressions.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Human Behavior
Background:
- The face is a critical channel for communicating pain.
- Decoding facial expressions of pain shows a discrepancy: eyes narrowing is frequent, but brow lowering/nose wrinkling are prioritized in evaluation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if this discrepancy in pain expression decoding relates to how observers' mental representations prioritize certain facial features.
- To determine the relative importance of specific facial features in the mental representation of pain expressions.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Assessed the weight observers allocated to different facial features (brow lowering, nose wrinkling, eyes narrowing) in mental representations of pain.
- Experiment 2: Directed participants' attention specifically to the sensory dimension of pain to test feature salience.
Main Results:
- Brow lowering and nose wrinkling/upper lip raising were given more weight in mental representations than eyes narrowing.
- This prioritization of affective features (brow lowering, nose wrinkling) persisted even when attention was directed toward the sensory dimension of pain.
Conclusions:
- Mental representations of facial expressions of pain appear biased towards affective information (brow lowering, nose wrinkling) over sensory information (eyes narrowing).
- This over-representation of affective cues may contribute to biases in pain estimation by both clinicians and laypersons based on facial appearance.
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