Abstract

"Pictures of Facial Affect-Ulm" – Standardized data collection of human facial emotion recognition

In interpersonal encounters, emotions are not only communicated through language and verbal communication, but also indirectly through emotional facial expressions. Partners of an interpersonal interaction analyze each other’s facial expressions in order to obtain information about the emotional status of the other person. Understanding facial emotion recognition is still one of the main topics in emotion research. In many areas of emotion research, images with emotional facial expressions are used to stimulate emotions, test for emotion recognition, or define and describe emotion categories. When using mimicked stimuli for experimental studies, the quality of the results is directly related to the validity of the emotion stimuli used. Consequently, a lot of effort goes into the creation of stimulus material.
This talk presents some first results of the evaluation process for the new picture set, “Pictures of Facial Affect Ulm (PFA-U)“. The new picture set was created with the intention to provide FACS-based emotional expression for researchers. The final image set consists of 48 people showing one emotional facial expressions. In general, the six basic emotions of happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise, and fear were displayed. In contrast to other picture sets stimuli from five perspectives are available that can be used for emotion research.