English
German
French
Italian
Spanish
Chinese
University of Western Ontario
Facial Expression and Social Behavior
Dr. Erin Heerey is an Associate Professor at the department of Psychology, and head of the Social Behavior lab at Western University in London, Ontario. In her work she focuses on social interactions, mainly dyadic interactions. How do people behave when they talk to strangers? What does their face give away when being prompted to talk about a specific subject with someone? And what are the social intricacies behind smiles?
Dr. Erin Heerey: "Measuring behavior is critical for understanding how we interact with the world"
Measuring behavior is critical for understanding a lot of the social problems that arise in the world. How for example diseases like COVID spread from one person to another, or how misinformation spreads from one person to another.
Watch the video to take a look into Dr. Heereys' Social Behavior Lab!
“Noldus FaceReader has saved the day! It has massively shortened the time scale of the coding that we have to do"
Dr. Erin Heerey | Social Behavior Lab, Department of Psychology | University of Western Ontario, Canada
Automatic facial expression recognition using FaceReader
Dr. Heerey's work has evolved from manually scoring videos on VHS to automatic facial expression recognition using Noldus' FaceReader. This has not only increased throughput, accuracy and the ease of scoring social behaviors in humans, but has also made it possible to make this data much more shareable amongst other researchers.
Video or pictures of peoples' faces are private, but when coded to anonimized data through FaceReader, it makes it possible to share this data and gain new perspectives and insights from other researchers from all over the world. Dr. Heerey calls this an open frontier in behavioral science, make sure to watch the video to gain her full insights!
