Automatic facial coding versus electromyography of mimicked, passive, and inhibited facial response to emotional faces

Decoding someone's facial expressions provides insights into his or her emotional experience. Recently, Automatic Facial Coding (AFC) software has been developed to provide measurements of emotional facial expressions. Previous studies provided first evidence for the sensitivity of such systems...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition and emotion 2021-07, Vol.35 (5), p.874-889
Main Authors: Höfling, T. Tim A., Alpers, Georg W., Gerdes, Antje B. M., Föhl, Ulrich
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automatic
Automatic facial coding
Decoding
Electromyography
emotion
Emotion recognition
Emotional responses
Emotions
facial electromyography
facial expression
Facial expressions
Inhibition
Mimicry
Muscles
Social interaction
Social interactions
Software
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Summary:Decoding someone's facial expressions provides insights into his or her emotional experience. Recently, Automatic Facial Coding (AFC) software has been developed to provide measurements of emotional facial expressions. Previous studies provided first evidence for the sensitivity of such systems to detect facial responses in study participants. In the present experiment, we set out to generalise these results to affective responses as they can occur in variable social interactions. Thus, we presented facial expressions (happy, neutral, angry) and instructed participants (N = 64) to either actively mimic, to look at them passively (n = 21), or to inhibit their own facial reaction (n = 22). A video stream for AFC and an electromyogram (EMG) of the zygomaticus and corrugator muscles were registered continuously. In the mimicking condition, both AFC and EMG differentiated well between facial expressions in response to the different emotional pictures. In the passive viewing and in the inhibition condition AFC did not detect changes in facial expressions whereas EMG was still highly sensitive. Although only EMG is sensitive when participants intend to conceal their facial reactions, these data extend previous findings that Automatic Facial Coding is a promising tool for the detection of intense facial reaction.
ISSN:0269-9931
1464-0600
DOI:10.1080/02699931.2021.1902786