The Complex Emotion Expression Database: A validated stimulus set of trained actors

Abstract

The vast majority of empirical work investigating the mechanisms supporting the perception and recognition of facial expressions is focused on basic expressions. Less is known about the underlying mechanisms supporting the processing of complex expressions, which provide signals about emotions related to more nuanced social behavior and inner thoughts. Here, we introduce the Complex Emotion Expression Database (CEED), a digital stimulus set of 243 basic and 237 complex emotional facial expressions. The stimuli represent six basic expressions (angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, sad, and surprised) and nine complex expressions (affectionate, attracted, betrayed, brokenhearted, contemptuous, desirous, flirtatious, jealous, and lovesick) that were posed by Black and White formally trained, young adult actors. All images were validated by a minimum of 50 adults in a 4-alternative forced choice task. Only images for which � 50% of raters endorsed the correct emotion label were included in the final database. This database will be an excellent resource for researchers interested in studying the developmental, behavioral, and neural mechanisms supporting the perception and recognition of complex emotion expressions.

Accurately detecting happy facial expressions associates with perceptions of flirtatiousness

“…It is this degree of ambiguity, however, that makes communication through facial expressions susceptible to misappraisal. This notion is consistent with previous work indicating that individuals closely scrutinize facial expressions to determine flirting, but certain expressions – ones that potentially convey flirtatiousness – are prone to detection errors (e.g., relatively high rates of false-positives and false-negatives; Benda & Scherf, 2020; Hall et al, 2014; Ranganath et al, 2009).…”

Construction of face databases for tasks to recognize facial expressions of basic emotions: a systematic review

“…Figure 1 presents the search and selection process for the 36 articles included in this systematic review 12 – 17 , 25 – 63 .…”

“…After the inclusion of these studies, three researchers (DM, BF, and MB) read the articles in full and extracted information such as year of publication and study locus, name of the database built, characteristics of the participants who expressed the emotions (number of participants, place of recruitment, gender, age and race), basic emotions expressed, and final total of stimuli included in the database and their specific characteristics ( Table 1 ) 12 – 16 , 25 – 63 . Subsequently, the methodological characteristics of the databases were collected, such as the method used to elicit the emotions, patterns in the capture of stimuli, criteria used in the validation stage, sample characteristics in the validation stage, and psychometric qualities assessed ( Table 2 ) 12 – 16 , 25 – 63 .…”

“…Subsequently, the methodological characteristics of the databases were collected, such as the method used to elicit the emotions, patterns in the capture of stimuli, criteria used in the validation stage, sample characteristics in the validation stage, and psychometric qualities assessed (Table 2) [12][13][14][15][16] . (2020) 25 The…”

The Reading Everyday Emotion Database (REED): A set of audio-visual recordings of emotions in music and language

“…To address some of those questions, various emotional stimuli corpora or databases have been developed (for a review of some of these databases, see Krumhuber et al, 2017;Wu et al, 2014). For example, psychologists may develop a stimulus set for experimental studies on emotion perception (e.g., Benda & Scherf, 2020;Thompson et al, 2013) and computer scientists may create a corpus of recordings to train machine learning models to annotate emotions automatically (e.g., Cosker et al, 2011;Yin et al, 2008). The development of these databases is often time-consuming and resource-intensive, but fortunately, most of these databases are made available and shared with other researchers.…”