Perspective

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For the sake of its incorporation into clinical diagnosis and management when practicing medicine, Ragsdale et al [1] studied human emotions based on under-appreciated explicitness in the subtleties of human face, a phenomenon recently popularized by Dr. Paul Ekman. I have been interested in Dr. Ekman's courses [2] since my addiction to television series "Lie To Me" [3]. However, I have been hesitant to delve into learning the intricacies of human emotions because the learner cannot unlearn the learning or un-know the knowing despite the learned being bestowed with the great responsibility of self-limiting the unlimited access to the privacy of human mind. Conceptually, when deciding to tread this path, one has to remember that one may only sharpen the innate "gut feeling" to read human face for exploring human mind because Ragsdale et al [1] reported that more than-half participants recognized portrayed emotions correctly before workshop, and that too unknowingly as reflected by less-than-one-third participants succeeding in knowledge questions. After workshop, face-expression-reading skill itself got sharpened in more participants than the acquisition of its knowledge (80% vs. 70%) [1], suggesting objectivity lagging behind subjectivity when reading human mind. Presence of prior training not helping to sharpen skills more [1] highlights natural "gut feeling" suffering with inherent trait of non-attainable near-perfect learning despite "zealous" medical students demonstrating more improvement in skill acquisition than "experienced" faculty or "indifferent" trainee-volunteers. The underlying reason for absence of superlative confidence ratings [1], while self-evaluating non-self-interpretations, could be apprehension "what if I would act based on my imperfect interpretation." This brings me to the finality requesting Dr. Ekman to develop futuristic face-expression-reading software (as similar to facial-recognition-system [4]) on air-gapped computers deriving data from cameras locked onto the faces of informed, consented individuals for pre-defined scenarios/indications because automated reads of the facial expressions, while prompting the blissfully untrained humans into actions based on the computerized interpretations, would thankfully not educate human eyes or human brains for unknowingly yet recurrently crossing the final hurdle and breaching the privacy of considerably-inviolable sanctity of human minds/emotions of people around them.

References

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1. Ragsdale JW, Van Deusen R, Rubio D, Spagnoletti C. Recognizing Patients' Emotions: Teaching Health Care Providers to Interpret Facial Expressions. Acad Med. 2016 Mar 15. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26983074 Accessed July 19, 2016.

2. Paul Ekman International, PLC. Our core modules. http://www.ekmaninternational.com/paul-ekman-international-plc-home/training-courses.aspx Accessed July 19, 2016.

3. Paul Ekman Group (PEG). 'Lie to Me'. http://www.paulekman.com/lie-to-me/ Accessed July 19, 2016.

4. Wikipedia®. Facial recognition system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system Accessed July 19, 2016.

Source(s) of Funding

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None

Competing Interests

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None