Iranian emotional face database: Acquisition and validation of a stimulus set of basic facial expressions

Abstract

Facial expressions play an essential role in social interactions. Databases of face images have furnished theories of emotion perception, as well as having applications in other disciplines such as facial recognition technology. However, the faces of many ethnicities remain largely underrepresented in the existing face databases, which can impact the generalizability of the theories and technologies developed based on them. Here, we present the first survey-validated database of Iranian faces. It consists of 248 images from 40 Iranian individuals portraying six emotional expressions --anger, sadness, fear, disgust, happiness, and surpriseas well as the neutral state. The photos were taken in a studio setting, following the common scenarios of emotion induction, and controlling for conditions of lighting, camera set up, and model's head posture. An evaluation survey confirmed a high agreement between the models' intended expressions and the raters' perception of them. The database is freely available online for academic research purposes.

Facial emotion recognition in refugee children with a history of war trauma.

“…Having found that refugee and nonrefugee children had similar emotion biases measured using facial morphs, we turned to investigate their emotion recognition and scan paths when viewing single emotional expressions. At this time, a more culturally relevant stimuli set of Iranian actors (Heydari et al, 2022) became available for use, which allowed us to eliminate any potential other-race­ effects. In line with our findings in the first two experiments, we found that refugee and nonrefugee children had similar emotional expression recognition accuracy.…”

“…Incorporating more socially relevant tasks might help us understand emotion processing in refugee children in different contexts and circumstances. Additionally, although the eye-tracking study (Study 3) used emotional expressions from the database of Middle Eastern actors (Heydari et al, 2022), it would be informative to measure scan paths on white European actors’ faces for comparison, as it is possible that participating children view own-race, culturally familiar faces in a different manner. For example, stimuli novelty, race, and age have been reported to influence scan paths in both children and adults (e.g., Proietti et al, 2015; Wheeler et al, 2011), although as we were investigating group differences, we expect that both Syrian and Jordanian children should be equally affected by any potential other-race effect arising from our stimuli.…”

“…The stimuli consisted of 20 photographs of four Middle Eastern actors (two male and two female) taken from the Iranian Emotional Face Database (Heydari et al, 2022). Each actor displayed five emotional expressions: anger, happiness, fear, neutral, and sadness.…”

“… Note. Example of three trials of different emotional expressions presented by the same actor (from Iranian Emotional Face Database; Heydari et al, 2022). Gaze samples of 11 ms (in blue circles) from one participant superimposed on the stimuli and AOI (in green rectangles) for illustrative purposes only.…”