How the faces game works
Pymetrics’ 2017 US patent names a facial affect test as the task behind its Faces game. In its version you see photographs of men and women showing different emotions and choose, from a set of four emotions, the one that best describes each person’s expression. Some photographs come with a story describing the situation; others are shown on their own.
The patent describes people who identify the emotion correctly without the story as having an acute ability to read facial expressions. Pymetrics does not publish how many faces the live game shows or how long you have for each.
Why some faces come with a story
The patent explains the reason for mixing the two. When a face gives relevant but unclear information, the situation strongly shapes how people read it: most judge the person to feel whatever fits the situation rather than what the face actually shows. Its example is someone in a painful situation whose expression shows fear, who is often read as being in pain.
So on photos with a story, decide what the face shows before you weigh the story. Pymetrics reported split-half reliability of .73 to .79 for the task.
How our practice version works
Our Faces practice shows 20 faces, one at a time, with 5 seconds each, and you choose from seven labels: happy, sad, angry, fearful, surprised, disgusted and neutral. It differs from the patent’s version in two ways: it offers seven choices rather than four, and it has no situation stories. The face count and time limit are ours. Faces is one of our free games.