Well Dr. John W. Thackery had too much pride to be associated with that and refused the money.
Cut to modern day version, I'm a computer programmer and I write code to correctly place humans from video feeds into various buckets based on the RGB colors I scan from bitmap image 2d arrays... and I say it places them into buckets like "possible upset" and "very much in flow state" or "bored, brain not engaged." And then sell this program/SAAS product to companies and they get value from these buckets... how is that still true snake oil?
E.g. take class A of students from one culture and class B of students from another culture, and assume the students all feel the same level of moderate anger, but the two cultures have different "anger display rules" as they're called.
The detector might judge all the students from one class as angry, but none from the other. Aggregating students into classes doesn't fix anything.
Similarly, if you took some students who have a certain expression when they're happy, and other students who have the same expression when they're afraid, and mixed them together in the same class, then whatever emotion the detector is interpreting the expression to mean is going to be triggered by completely unrelated things, and the signal won't be meaningful at all.
Yes, there are differences - especially in identification of intensity. But in general detection is pretty reliable across cultures.
Eg:
The results show that the overall accuracy of emotional expression recognition by Indian participants was high and very similar to the ratings from Dutch participants. However, there were significant cross-cultural differences in classification of emotion categories and their corresponding parameters. Indians rated certain expressions comparatively more genuine, higher in valence, and less intense in comparison to original Radboud ratings. The misclassifications/ confusion for specific emotional categories differed across the two cultures indicating subtle but significant differences between the cultures.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Unfortunately that's simply not true. Your example merely shows reliabiliy between two countries, not all countries. You can research, for example, how Japanese people tend to smile when angry, sad, or embarrassed, in total contrast to Westerners.
This is one of the classic "extreme" examples, but it demonstrates how my point holds -- errors are not random but are highly correlated with the culture -- not to mention the subculture, the individual (the person who hides all emotion when angry), etc.
isn't that a pretty sane and basic assumption ?
Seriously though, especially with individuals, why shouldn't you use all the information available, if it produces results even an iota better than blind acceptance (and for most people, their empathic-sense does)?
In the context of real life, where we know people, are interacting with them, and are reading cues from their whole body and their movement over time, then we're much better at assessing emotions and we'd be pretty foolish to ignore emotional signals.
I don't think it is setting the bar too high, "far better than random" can still be abysmal.
You're right that humans are better than random, but there is a wide range of emotions. Assume for the sake of argument there are 10 emotions to identify and evenly distributed in frequency, then random is getting it right 10% of the time. Let's say humans get it right 30% of the time from still photographs of real-life situations (not staged) -- I'm making this specific number up but depending on the type of experiment, it's a reasonable ballpark one.
That's still horribly low, wrong more than half the time. I can't think of any situation where that could warrant any kind of responsible decision-making. If we were talking 95% accuracy then there could be value, I'm not asking for 99.99% accuracy. But if reliable detection is something like 30%, I stand by calling this "snake oil" even if it's not just random.