Research and Publication
By Lauren Helfgott, Upper School Science Faculty
A team of seven Upper School biology and chemistry students conducted a human anatomy study across the 2023-2024 academic year and are now published authors.
Sophie Crain ’26, Emerson DeBaecke ’26, Nikhil Patel ’26, Alexandra Simon ’25, Bryce Twyman ’25, Benjamin Williams ’25 and Aileen Zhang ’26 researched whether eyebrows are an essential and/or age-dependent facial feature for accurately recognizing the emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and confusion. This collaboration across Tower Hill’s student body, faculty and staff was published in The Journal of Emerging Investigators (JEI), a Harvard-based scientific journal.
Findings revealed that removing eyebrows results in a significant decrease in participants’ ability to accurately recognize anger from experimental facial images (Figure 1). In addition, Upper School adolescents (15-18 years) were more likely to misidentify emotions from eyebrow-obscured photographs compared to Middle School adolescents (12-14 years) and adults (21+ years). Finally, Upper School adolescents took longer (>5 seconds) to identify the correct emotion from eyebrow-obscured photographs than when shown the same unaltered control photographs. Therefore, the age group studied that is most at risk of misinterpretation and delayed response to facial cues are Upper School adolescents. The final manuscript produced by the Human Anatomy Research Team is titled, Obscurity of Eyebrows Influences Recognition of Human Emotion and Impacts Older Adolescents, and is freely read by visiting the JEI website.
Whether cooperating with one another during experimental design or deliberating conclusive reasoning from their data, the research team operated under the shared goal of building their eyebrow study from the ground up.
Crain reflected on her experience as a student researcher: “What I find amazing is that we were really able to build this study from scratch. Our finished product is a great representation of all the brainstorming and collaboration that we did, and I feel that I learned about human behavior! Although we may have inherently known that eyebrows should make a difference in recognizing social cues, we were able to scientifically support this with our findings.”
The students learned from one another and continued to grow as a result of the multiple rounds of online scientific feedback provided by JEI. The professionalism that exudes from their final manuscript is a direct result of the team’s ability to think critically and collaboratively. In addition, the willingness to routinely seek and receive support from within the Tower Hill community, as well as through the scientific journal’s peer editing process, are fine examples of how Tower Hill students engage in healthy interdependence, address scientific issues through scholarly work, and become published scientific authors in the process.
The final manuscript they produced is a manifestation of the collaborative efforts of well over 100 individuals within the Tower Hill community!
The first round of support came from the assembly of a Scientific Review Committee (SRC), composed of the Social Emotional Learning Department Chair Dr. Amy Cuddy, Science Department Chair Luisa Sawyer and Upper School science teacher Dr. Steve Harris. The assembly of the SRC was a journal requirement that ensured the ethical treatment of participants throughout the study. Four additional Upper School teachers (Dr. Andrew Brown, Jake Viscusi, Michelle Wrambel and Casey Yuros) bravely offered to have their facial expressions photographed and analyzed by study participants. An additional 40 Upper School students and 40 faculty and staff, including Head of School Sarah Baker, agreed to participate in the primary or the follow-up study. This network of support did not just end in the Upper School—Middle School Head Tim Weymouth and Middle School science teachers Lara Kossiakoff, Kathleen McMillen, Luisa Sawyer and Mary Taylor all encouraged an additional 40 Middle School student participants by emphasizing the importance of collaborative and cross-divisional efforts.
Student researcher DeBaecke expressed her team’s gratitude. “On behalf of our team, thank you to the wonderful Tower Hill students and faculty who participated in our human anatomy study on facial cues! We would not have been able to succeed without each person’s time and eagerness to help with our research.”
