An Eye Tracking Investigation of Pain Decoding Based on Older and Younger Adults’ Facial Expressions

Nonverbal pain cues such as facial expressions, are useful in the systematic assessment of pain in people with dementia who have severe limitations in their ability to communicate. Nonetheless, the extent to which observers rely on specific pain-related facial responses (e.g., eye movements, frowning) when judging pain remains unclear. Observers viewed three types of videos of patients expressing pain (younger patients, older patients without dementia, older patients with dementia) while wearing an eye tracker device that recorded their viewing behaviors. They provided pain ratings for each patient in the videos. These observers assigned higher pain ratings to older adults compared to younger adults and the highest pain ratings to patients with dementia. Pain ratings assigned to younger adults showed greater correspondence to objectively coded facial reactions compared to older adults. The correspondence of observer ratings was not affected by the cognitive status of target patients as there were no differences between the ratings assigned to older adults with and without dementia. Observers’ percentage of total dwell time (amount of time that an observer glances or fixates within a defined visual area of interest) across specific facial areas did not predict the correspondence of observers’ pain ratings to objective coding of facial responses. Our results demonstrate that patient characteristics such as age and cognitive status impact the pain decoding process by observers when viewing facial expressions of pain in others.