Pupillary Responses of Asian Observers in Discriminating Real from Fake Smiles: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

This work is a part of a research effort on detecting the differences between human responses to real and fake smiles, by watching observers of different smiling video stimuli (displayer’s smiles). Pupil diameter was recorded from 10 Asian observers (6 males and 4 females), while watching 9 real smile stimuli and 10 fake smile stimuli. The preliminary analysis on pupil data revealed that the pupil size increased more for fake smile stimuli as compared to real smile stimuli in the case of male observers, and vice versa in the case of female observers. To the best of our knowledge, most of the work on discriminating real from fake smiles was analyzed from the smile displayer’s point of view. Our results were found from observers’ pupillary responses. If we consider fake smiles as negative emotions and real smiles as positive emotions, then this outcome may be comparable with previous findings on pupil dilation. Our results show that analyzing an observer’s pupillary responses may help to understand the displayer’s actual state of mind