FACES in the Lab and Faces in the Crowd: Integrating Microcomputers into the Psychology Course

Abstract

This article describes an exercise that teaches students about methodological issues concerned with making reliable observations of behavior. After learning Ekman's (1972) Facial Affect Scoring Technique from a microcomputer program simulating expressions of emotion, students recorded the facial expression, gender, and age of people in natural settings, computed interobserver agreement scores, and submitted a laboratory report. This exercise generated much discussion about research methods, transferred skills from the classroom to a research setting, and illustrated our view that the microcomputer is a new tool that supplements, but does not replace, existing instructional techniques.