East Asian Young and Older Adult Perceptions of Emotional Faces From an Age- and Sex-Fair East Asian Facial Expression Database

Abstract

There is increasing interest in clarifying how different face emotion expressions are perceived by people from different cultures, of different ages and sex. However, scant availability of well-controlled emotional face stimuli from non-Western populations limit the evaluation of cultural differences in face emotion perception and how this might be modulated by age and sex differences. We present a database of East Asian face expression stimuli, enacted by young and older, male and female, Taiwanese using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Combined with a prior database, this present database consists of 90 identities with happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised and neutral expressions amounting to 628 photographs. Twenty young and 24 older East Asian raters scored the photographs for intensities of multiple-dimensions of emotions and induced affect. Multivariate analyses characterized the dimensionality of perceived emotions and quantified effects of age and sex. We also applied commercial software to extract computer-based metrics of emotions in photographs. Taiwanese raters perceived happy faces as one category, sad, angry, and disgusted expressions as one category, and fearful and surprised expressions as one category. Younger females were more sensitive to face emotions than younger males. Whereas, older males showed reduced face emotion sensitivity, older female sensitivity was similar or accentuated relative to young females. Commercial software dissociated six emotions according to the FACS demonstrating that defining visual features were present. Our findings show that East Asians perceive a different dimensionality of emotions than Western-based definitions in face recognition software, regardless of age and sex. Critically, stimuli with detailed cultural norms are indispensable in interpreting neural and behavioral responses involving human facial expression processing. To this end, we add to the tools, which are available upon request, for conducting such research.

Older adults have difficulty decoding emotions from the eyes, whereas easterners have difficulty decoding emotion from the mouth

“…Our findings also help to explain the results of a recent study that indicated Easterners tend to have three categories of emotion faces: happy, sad/angry/disgusted, and fearful/surprised 36 . Happy expressions can be distinguished uniquely by an upturned mouth, and despite Easterners having some difficulty decoding mouth information, happy mouths are different from all other emotions and are thus easier to decode.…”

Mindfulness‐based cognitive therapy on bereavement grief: Alterations of resting‐state network connectivity associate with changes of anxiety and mindfulness

“…Second, we asked the participants to passively view the facial expression pictures in the emotional arousal state, but we did not record the responses of subjective emotion level during or after performing the emotional arousal task. Because the emotional arousal after the consecutive presentation of emotional facial expressions has been documented in the literature (Lang et al, 2005; Tu et al, 2018), we assumed that the emotion was successfully induced in our task, which was orally confirmed by the bereaved participants. Third, the baseline FFMQ assessment before the MBCT course might be with poor precision (Chiesa, 2013; Davidson, 2010), for the possibility that the bereaved participants with high levels of emotional entanglements did not adequately comprehend the mindfulness questionnaire.…”

“…The International Affective Picture System (IAPS) is a standardized instrument for the induction of emotional states (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005). The current study used datasets of the Taiwanese version of IAPS (T‐IAPS) to induce the emotional arousal in participants (Tu, Lin, Suzuki, & Goh, 2018). Therefore, 30 pictures of negative facial expression and 30 pictures of neutral facial expression were drawn randomly from the T‐IAPS as continuous visual stimuli in the emotion‐arousal session.…”

KAPODI- The Searchable Database of 364 Available Emotional Stimuli Sets

“…Riegel et al, 2015;Scott et al, 2019) or faces (e.g. Prada et al, 2018;Tu et al, 2018). In an attempt to present a broader range of stimuli sets, Krumhuber et al (2017) systematically reviewed dynamic datasets of facial expressions.…”