It is an interesting research piece, if just for its quirkiness. I dont know all the ins and out about it, but I do have a familiarity with it. You will likely have noted the name of one of the authors, who is of course my good lady wife.

I may have a few things twisted here, but if memory serves, this piece grew out of an idea for the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which often publishes quirky stuff at that time of year, and it grew from there. The beauty about this piece of research is that it was completely free (i.e. no grants were applied for this research, in case people were worried that good tax dollars were being used on such a project). All the data was collected at research meetings and talks etc (if I remember correctly).

It also has the advantage that not only is the Smiley Face task a good method to teach the design and implementing of good clinical trials, but its data can be used in a secondary manner to highlight apparent cognitive and perceptual differences between different groups of people. And again, all at no extra cost to the tax payer!

Jonny

The path to good scholarship is paved with imagined patterns. - David M Raup