First Goatse

January 10, 2006 @ 4:01 pm · Posted by Boxen · Filed under Funny, Pop Culture

Goatse Reaction

Here’s a guy that decided to show his friends Goatse and photograph their reactions.

9 Comments

  1. bluegrass girl Said,

    January 11, 2006 @ 2:21 pm

    Priceless. A few look posed, but the ones that aren’t are hysterical. The funniest ones are those where either there is no discernible facial reaction (which is disturbing and seems to suggest some pathology on the part of the viewer) and those in which 2 people have completely different reactions.

    This little project actually bears a strong resemblence to a huge are of research in psychology that involves coding facial expressions and physiological responses to disgusting or threatening images. I’m willing to beat that Goatse is more explicit than the ones used in research. However, I’m NOT willing to actually look at it myself to find out.

  2. Electro Rock Said,

    January 11, 2006 @ 5:20 pm

    I love this – I want to cover the faces and just look at the eyes, to see if I can guess their expression!

  3. bluegrass girl Said,

    January 12, 2006 @ 12:05 pm

    That shows you have normal processing of facial expressions of emotion. Eye tracking studies show that the eye region is more attended to than the lower face when labelling others’ expressions, unless you’re autistic, in which case you spend a lot of time fruitlessly examining the mouth region.

    It’s interesting to see how many have the wide eyed (surprise, fear) look versus the narrowed eyelids (anger, disgust).

    I think the bodily postures are hysterical — note how many people appear to have physically moved away from the screen, as if the goatse is coming to get them.

  4. Electro Rock Said,

    January 12, 2006 @ 12:31 pm

    I recently attended a talk showing that by requiring austistic individuals to focus on the eyes, they are more likely to adopt socially appropriate responses to activities. Of course they don’t realize this is effective, and once you remove the requirement they default to their lower-face processing.

    We can now wait for the owner of this blog to refer to his upper-chest processing. Then we can follow up with our commentary on his autism.

  5. bluegrass girl Said,

    January 12, 2006 @ 1:28 pm

    Interesting — that is consistent with other data showing that if you flip the presentation of facial expression images (so that the face is upside down), autistic people perform better at labelling the expressions. They’ve got the wrong rule, and even when you get them to engage in behavior consistent with the proper rule, they still don’t infer it.
    It’s sort of a mystery to me why nondisordered people are more driven by the eye region than the mouth region, as frequently the mouth region for different expressions are more dissimilar than are the eye regions, thus seemingly making it more predictive of the emotional state.

    Upper-chest processing indeed. I guess we could hook him up to an eye tracker to verify, but it seems like a waste of equipment to verify what we already know — he likes boobs.

  6. danger Said,

    January 12, 2006 @ 3:55 pm

    Very interesting. Two things.

    1) I almost always look at a person’s mouth when I am talking to them. I find myself doing it when I watch movies or tv, too, and then have a harder time recalling what the person looked like later. I wonder if that makes me autistic? Or at least more asperberger-like. I am conscious of it, so maybe it’s not so bad.

    2) I showed my wife the goatse last nite — made it her new laptop’s background image. Damn, her expression was priceless, but I didn’t have a camera handy.

    mmmm, handies.

  7. bluegrass girl Said,

    January 12, 2006 @ 5:20 pm

    Luckily for you, autism is not defined by looking at people’s mouths rather than eyes. I think I can safely say you are not in the autism spectrum (although I wonder if strippers can count as a stereotyped interest?). If anything, you are probably just missing out on some useful cues by not looking at people’s eyes. The (somewhat suspect) research on lying/deception indicates that nonverbal cues to lying appear to be strongest in the eye region. Maybe you’re getting deceived all the time and you don’t know it.

    Your wife allowed you to put this picture on her laptop? This makes me want to look at it to see just how depraved it really is.

  8. danger Said,

    January 12, 2006 @ 10:26 pm

    Don’t look! For the love of god!

  9. Boxen Said,

    January 13, 2006 @ 11:25 am

    Update:
    I think the photos with “mrneutron” under them are posted by the guy that started this reaction project. He openned the Flickr account up so others could post there as well. So it’s more prone now to poses.

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