Identification of pain in neonates: the adults’ visual perception of neonatal facial features

Looking at neonatal facial features of pain: do health and non-health professionals differ?

“… 11 In the other study with the same group of pictures, the authors showed that adults who correctly identified the images of neonates with and without pain, compared to those who do not, looked more often and longer at the nasolabial furrow. 12 Thus, the present investigation is a pioneer in evaluating, by visual tracking, the facial areas of newborn infants in which health and non-health professionals fix their gaze when evaluating neonatal pain. The visual tracking technique proved to be robust, capturing the look 93% of the time of the experiment.…”

“…As reported in previous studies, 11 , 12 each participant evaluated two pictures of ten healthy full-term newborns, one taken at rest and the other during a painful procedure (capillary or venous puncture, or intramuscular injection) performed by medical request. The photos used were from the database of Heiderich and were used with the author's permission.…”

“…The characteristics of the equipment were described elsewhere. 11 , 12 A Precision M6800 BTX model notebook (Dell, Texas, USA) with Tobii Studio software (Tobii Technology AB, Danderyd, Sweden) was used to perform the equipment calibration and record and analyze the data captured by tracking the gaze of each participant.…”

Visual attention during neonatal pain assessment: A 2-second exposure to a facial expression is sufficient

“…Methods -Classification Scoring: All numerical ratings verbally answered by the subjects on either positive or negative face stimuli were classified considering the following scoring intervals [11]: 0-2 (negative, absence of pain), 3-5 (positive, low/mild presence of pain), and 6-10 (positive, moderate/severe presence of pain).…”

“…al [13] originally reported that there was no difference in the recognition accuracy of facial expression of pain in newborns between health professionals and parents when analyzing the face of full-term infants in an analogous experiment using printed photographs. Recently, researchers have found as well that such classification accuracy is not only similar, but also based holistically on the same facial parts [7,11,14,8]. However, since the sample group of non-experts is composed of subjects with neither professional nor personal experience on attempting to score pain in newborns, non-experts have in general overestimated the presence of pain in the experimental setting carried out, showing the worst classification results on the painless rest situations of negative stimuli.…”