Ballistocardiographic Responses to Dynamic Facial Displays of Emotion While Sitting on the EMFi Chair

Abstract

The aim of the present paper was to study heart rate changes during a video stimulation depicting two actors (male and female) producing dynamic facial expressions of happiness, sadness, and a neutral expression. We measured ballistocardiographic emotion-related heart rate responses with an unobtrusive measurement device called the EMFi chair. Ratings of subjective responses to the video stimuli were also collected. The results showed that the video stimuli evoked significantly different ratings of emotional valence and arousal. Heart rate decelerated in response to all stimuli and the deceleration was the strongest during negative stimulation. Furthermore, stimuli from the male actor evoked significantly larger arousal ratings and heart rate responses than the stimuli from the female actor. The results also showed differential responding between female and male participants. The present results support the hypothesis that heart rate decelerates in response to films depicting dynamic negative facial expressions. The present results also support the idea that the EMFi chair can be used to perceive emotional responses from people while they are interacting with technology.

Widespread and lateralized social brain activity for processing dynamic facial expressions

“…Limbic regions, including the amygdala and vmPFC, have been shown to be involved in emotional processing (e.g., Breiter et al, 1996;Winston et al, 2003). The activity of these regions can therefore account for the elicitation of subjective and physiological emotional responses to dynamic facial expressions (Anttonen et al, 2009;Sato & Yoshikawa, 2007a). At the same time, as these regions are known to be involved in several other social functions, such as the evaluation of trustworthiness (Winston et al, 2002) and perception of social support (Sato et al, 2016), it is possible that the observation of dynamic facial expressions elicits other, currently untested, psychological processes through activity in the amygdala and vmPFC.…”

Heart Rate Responses to Synthesized Affective Spoken Words

“…First, artifacts caused, for example, by body movements were removed from the heart rate data with the algorithm described in Anttonen et al [21]. Then, the data were baseline corrected using a one-second prestimulus baseline.…”

“…The Quatech DAQP-16 card digitized the heart rate signal to a PC with a Windows XP operating system. The EMFi chair is a regular-looking office chair that has been developed and tested for unobtrusive measuring of heart rate changes [19][20][21]. The chair is embedded with electromechanical film (EMFi) sensors in its seat, backrest, and armrests.…”

Facial expression arousal level modulates facial mimicry

“…Sad facial expressions are normally thought to indicate low arousal levels (Russell and Bullock, 1985), and hence these data suggest that high-and low-arousal unpleasant expressions have similar potential for facial mimicry. However, these experiments did not quantify the arousal level of their stimuli, and thus the possibility exists that some sad face stimuli could indicate high-arousal/intensity levels (e.g., Anttonen et al, 2009;Harrison et al, 2007). As such, whether high-and low-arousal unpleasant facial stimuli induce comparable facial EMG activity remains unclear.…”