12 out of 20 is good, the average on fark.com where I got the link seemed to be 12 to 14 :-)
I'm not good with faces either. One person said that facial recognition and reading expressions are two unrelated areas of the brain, and I can believe that.
No, 14 out of 20 is good! I found the link on fark.com, and most people who felt good enough about their results to report them got 12 to 14 right.
I saw a popular science show about smiling on tv once, and they said that people's ability to tell a genuine smile from a fake one was very culturally dependent. Americans were not very good at it, because in America smiles are part of polite conversation. I remember the trouble that caused me when I lived there.
In Denmark on the other hand, people typically tend to smile mostly involuntarily. If someone went around punctuating their sentences with a salesman's smile, it would freak people out.
I don't know what it's like in Germany. It's my impression that you smile more than Danes but less than Americans.
For me personally, I have a theory that I tend to be good at picking up facial expressions because I have trained myself to be consciously aware of them. People who aren't on the autism spectrum probably depend more on unconsciously reading the social context, so they don't do as well on out of context smiles like in this test.
Well, even if you couldn't distinguish them at all and were just guessing randomly you'd expect to get ~10 right, so I don't think 12 or 14 is that good a mark.
I actually tend to do reasonably well at the facial expressions tests I've done, which confuses me given that hello, autistic? I think two things are going on: first, like you said, I've trained myself to consciously recognise some expressions. Second, although I might do reasonably well if you sit me in front of a bunch of photographs and ask me to pick whether the people are a) happy b) sad c) angry or whatever - or in this case whether their smiles are real or fake - that's a really damn artificial environment and it doesn't mean that I look for this stuff "in the wild", so to speak. Like, I was looking at the smiles going "I think I remember reading somewhere that there's this eye muscle used in smiling that you can't move voluntarily so er let's try looking for that" but I would never ever do that kind of thing in RL. In fact, I don't bother trying to look for fake smiles at all in RL. It's... my main priority in terms of social stuff is not making absolutely massive faux pas and overlooking signals that are essentially being shouted in my direction. If someone is fake!smiling at me I don't think they'll be insulted if I just assume it's a real smile, so I can leave that stuff alone and focus my resources on things like picking up whether people are bored by the current topic of conversation and trying to signal to me to switch to something else.
ETA: Also, don't remember how it is in Denmark but I agree that on average Germans probably smile less than Americans. Which might also explain why I don't really care in RL - in my cultural background fake smiles aren't as much a part of standard politeness so smiles are probably either real or ones where the person is hoping you'll think they're real, if that makes sense?
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-09 10:15 pm (UTC)Not that this surprises me. It would have surprised me if I hadn't done badly, really *cough*autistic*cough*
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-10 06:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-10 04:05 pm (UTC)I'm not good with faces either. One person said that facial recognition and reading expressions are two unrelated areas of the brain, and I can believe that.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-10 04:03 pm (UTC)I saw a popular science show about smiling on tv once, and they said that people's ability to tell a genuine smile from a fake one was very culturally dependent. Americans were not very good at it, because in America smiles are part of polite conversation. I remember the trouble that caused me when I lived there.
In Denmark on the other hand, people typically tend to smile mostly involuntarily. If someone went around punctuating their sentences with a salesman's smile, it would freak people out.
I don't know what it's like in Germany. It's my impression that you smile more than Danes but less than Americans.
For me personally, I have a theory that I tend to be good at picking up facial expressions because I have trained myself to be consciously aware of them. People who aren't on the autism spectrum probably depend more on unconsciously reading the social context, so they don't do as well on out of context smiles like in this test.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-11-10 05:18 pm (UTC)I actually tend to do reasonably well at the facial expressions tests I've done, which confuses me given that hello, autistic? I think two things are going on: first, like you said, I've trained myself to consciously recognise some expressions. Second, although I might do reasonably well if you sit me in front of a bunch of photographs and ask me to pick whether the people are a) happy b) sad c) angry or whatever - or in this case whether their smiles are real or fake - that's a really damn artificial environment and it doesn't mean that I look for this stuff "in the wild", so to speak. Like, I was looking at the smiles going "I think I remember reading somewhere that there's this eye muscle used in smiling that you can't move voluntarily so er let's try looking for that" but I would never ever do that kind of thing in RL. In fact, I don't bother trying to look for fake smiles at all in RL. It's... my main priority in terms of social stuff is not making absolutely massive faux pas and overlooking signals that are essentially being shouted in my direction. If someone is fake!smiling at me I don't think they'll be insulted if I just assume it's a real smile, so I can leave that stuff alone and focus my resources on things like picking up whether people are bored by the current topic of conversation and trying to signal to me to switch to something else.
ETA: Also, don't remember how it is in Denmark but I agree that on average Germans probably smile less than Americans. Which might also explain why I don't really care in RL - in my cultural background fake smiles aren't as much a part of standard politeness so smiles are probably either real or ones where the person is hoping you'll think they're real, if that makes sense?