Mug Shot Study Shows People Arrested in America Can’t Help but Smile
Justin Bieber looks quite cheerful for someone who is in custody. (Photo: Getty Images)
America has an incarceration problem, but you wouldn’t know it if you looked through some of our mug shots. A study done by the Aizman Law Firm shows that smiling is the most common expression you’ll find when you look through photos of arrestees. Upon reviewing 30,000 mugshots from around the country, they found that 59 percent of people grinned for the camera, while only 21 percent appeared sad in their mug shots.
Aizman Law Firm scoured images on mugshots.com, and using a program, collected extra data about the arrestees, including their names, counties, cities, states, and gender. They then ran the images through Microsoft Cognitive Learning API, which is a facial-recognition tool. “This API only uses the emotions that are universally recognized across the world,” Emily Pierce, a project manager on the study, told Yahoo Style. “There are signature things, such as your eyebrows being furrowed or your chin being raised, that tip off the API as to what emotion they’re conveying.”
The study broke down the range of emotions as follows: happiness, sadness, anger (7 percent), contempt (7 percent), surprise (5 percent), disgust (1 percent), and fear (1 percent). Pierce says while they can’t be 100 percent sure of the range of emotions actually going on in each mug shot, the API is great at picking up on the universal expressions that usually signify the abovementioned feelings. “We can’t say ultimately what the person is feeling inside their own mind — it’s just basically indicators as to what they’re conveying,” she says. “I think that ultimately, the person could be conveying multiple emotions as well, and then the service returns a confidence level to us. What we did was take the emotion with the highest confidence level and use that as an indicator to categorize each image.”
As for the results, Adina Antonucci, another project manager, says she was very surprised by the happy-go-lucky-looking arrestees. “It’s strange,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s maybe because we’re so accustomed to smiling in front of the camera, or if people are nervous.”
You can read the full study here.
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