The McGill Face Database: Validation and Insights Into the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Complex Mental States

Schmidtmann, Gunnar; Jennings, Ben; Sandra, Dasha A.; Pollock, Jordan; Gold, Ian

doi:10.1177/0301006620901671

Cited by 18 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The stimuli were taken from the McGill Face Database ( Schmidtmann et al., 2020 ). The full McGill Face Database contains colour photographs of 93 different expressions of mental states portrayed by two English-speaking professional actors (one male and one female).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

In the Blink of an Eye: Reading Mental States From Briefly Presented Eye Regions

et al. 2020

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Faces provide not only cues to an individual’s identity, age, gender, and ethnicity but also insight into their mental states. The aim was to investigate the temporal aspects of processing of facial expressions of complex mental states for very short presentation times ranging from 12.5 to 100 ms in a four-alternative forced choice paradigm based on Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Results show that participants are able to recognise very subtle differences between facial expressions; performance is better than chance, even for the shortest presentation time. Importantly, we show for the first time that observers can recognise these expressions based on information contained in the eye region only. These results support the hypothesis that the eye region plays a particularly important role in social interactions and that the expressions in the eyes are a rich source of information about other peoples’ mental states. When asked to what extent the observers guessed during the task, they significantly underestimated their ability to make correct decisions, yet perform better than chance, even for very brief presentation times. These results are particularly relevant in the light of the current COVID-19 pandemic and the associated wearing of face coverings.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

In the Blink of an Eye: Reading Mental States From Briefly Presented Eye Regions

et al. 2020

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“…The GEMEP database includes the complex social expressions of tenderness, interest, and pleasure [31]. The McGill Face Database [33] is composed of 93 different expressions that include basic, complex cognitive, and complex social expressions. While the McGill Database has an excellent range of complex expression stimuli, the limitation is that there are only two actors (one male, one female) who portray all the expressions, which restricts the generalizability of any findings.…”

Section: Existing Emotional Expression Databasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Benda

Scherf

2020

PLoS ONE

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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.

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“…Throughout all publications including emotions, between 1 and 93 distinct emotions have been assessed (Table 6). While images were assessed on a maximum of 6 different emotions, faces were assessed on up to 93 different emotions (Schmidtmann et al, 2020). However, this study reporting such a great number of emotions was an exception, as the mean number of assessed emotions (mean:>7.09; SD: 9.47) remained relatively similar to that of audio-stimuli (mean:…”

Section: Number Of Stimulimentioning

confidence: 74%

KAPODI- The Searchable Database of 364 Available Emotional Stimuli Sets

Diconne¹,

Paltoglou²,

Kountouriotis³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Emotional stimuli such as images, words, music, speech, or video-clips are often used in studies researching emotion. Over the past decades, new sets have continuously been published and presented to the research community. The immense number of available sets can complicate the task when researchers are looking for suitable stimuli for their study.This paper presents the comprehensive work of the creation of a database currently including 364 stimuli sets published between 1963 and 2020. All included sets are freely available or available upon request. Over 45 aspects, including over 25 key set characteristics such as sort, number and resolution of included stimuli; rating scales; included emotions; age, gender and number of raters; or, age, gender and number of models, have been extracted and listed for each stimuli set. A searchable online version of the database allows users to select specific set characteristics and to find matching stimuli sets accordingly. The KAPODI searchable database facilitates finding of and comparison between individual sets, and therefore provides a useful resource for researchers aiming to access emotional stimuli sets.

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The McGill Face Database: Validation and Insights Into the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Complex Mental States

Cited by 18 publications

References 29 publications

In the Blink of an Eye: Reading Mental States From Briefly Presented Eye Regions

In the Blink of an Eye: Reading Mental States From Briefly Presented Eye Regions

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

KAPODI- The Searchable Database of 364 Available Emotional Stimuli Sets

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