Warsaw set of emotional facial expression pictures: a validation study of facial display photographs

Abstract

Emotional facial expressions play a critical role in theories of emotion and figure prominently in research on almost every aspect of emotion. This article provides a background for a new database of basic emotional expressions. The goal in creating this set was to provide high quality photographs of genuine facial expressions. Thus, after proper training, participants were inclined to express “felt” emotions. The novel approach taken in this study was also used to establish whether a given expression was perceived as intended by untrained judges. The judgment task for perceivers was designed to be sensitive to subtle changes in meaning caused by the way an emotional display was evoked and expressed. Consequently, this allowed us to measure the purity and intensity of emotional displays, which are parameters that validation methods used by other researchers do not capture. The final set is comprised of those pictures that received the highest recognition marks (e.g., accuracy with intended display) from independent judges, totaling 210 high quality photographs of 30 individuals. Descriptions of the accuracy, intensity, and purity of displayed emotion as well as FACS AU's codes are provided for each picture. Given the unique methodology applied to gathering and validating this set of pictures, it may be a useful tool for research using face stimuli. The Warsaw Set of Emotional Facial Expression Pictures (WSEFEP) is freely accessible to the scientific community for non-commercial use by request at http://www.emotional-face.org.

Relating Attentional Biases for Stimuli Associated with Social Reward and Punishment to Autistic Traits

“…For the happy expression condition, the faces were those of 20 male and 20 female models taken from the AR face database (Martinez & Benavente, 1998). For the angry expression condition, the faces were those of 12 male and 12 female models taken from the Warsaw Set of Emotional Facial Expression Pictures (Olszanowski et al, 2015). Both face sets were photographs of real people modelling a variety of expressions, of which happy and neutral and angry and neutral, respectively, were used for the feedback display in the present study.…”

The many faces of a face: Comparing stills and videos of facial expressions in eight dimensions (SAVE database)

“…For instance, they include Argentinian (Argentine Set of Facial Expressions of Emotion: Vaiman, Wagner, Caicedo, & Pereno, 2015), Chinese (Wang & Markham, 1999), Polish (WSEFEP: Olszanowski et al, 2015), or Swedish models (Umeå University Database of Facial Expressions: Samuelsson, Jarnvik, Henningsson, Andersson, & Carlbring, 2012). Regarding the models' ethnicity, most databases include exclusively (e.g., Radboud Faces Database-RaFD: Langner et al, 2010;FACES: Ebner et al, 2010;KDEF: Lundqvist et al, 1998) or a majority (the McEwan Faces: McEwan et al, 2014;NimStim: Tottenham et al, 2009) of white or European descent models (for exceptions, see, e.g., the Chicago Face Database-CFD [Ma, Correll, & Wittenbrink, 2015] and the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expression of Emotion-JACFEE [Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988]).…”

“…Participants were asked to keep their mouth closed during shooting to avoid showing their teeth (e.g., Tottenham et al, 2009). During the recordings, to obtain a varied set of facial expressions (i.e., frowning, neutral and smiling) the director referred to some scenarios, or asked participants to imagine or remember situations that would elicit the intended expression (for similar instructions, see Dalrymple et al, 2013;Olszanowski et al, 2015). For example, to obtain a smiling expression the director asked the participants to think about a funny event that they had recently experienced.…”

“…We will focus on databases that include real human models. Among these, some include professional actors (NimStim Set of Facial Expressions: Tottenham et al, 2009), but most use lay volunteers that are either extensively trained (e.g., in using explicit guidelines regarding the optimal representation of the intended facial expressions; Ebner, Riediger, & Lindenberger, 2010) or coached by the experimenters (e.g., by encouraging models to imagine situations that would elicit the intended facial expressions; Warsaw Set of Emotional Facial Expression Pictures-WSEFEP: Olszanowski et al, 2015).…”

Positive online attentional training as a means of modifying attentional and interpretational biases among the clinically depressed: An experimental study using eye tracking

“…The emotional intensity of the positive faces we used was significantly higher than zero intensity assigned to neutral faces (M = .68, SD = .08, t (28) = 46.18, p < .001; ratings for one face were missing in the original data). See Olszanowski et al (2015) for details about the scoring procedure. Words were selected from the Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley & Lang, 1999).…”