Development and Validation of Emotion Recognition Software in the Indian Population

Abstract

Though written extensively, recent debates on universality of emotions have shown that age, gender, and ethnicity have greater implications in the ability to identify expressions from faces. Facial emotion recognition deficits have been consistently shown in psychiatric conditions, which necessitates the need to construct a culturally sensitive tool. Fourteen actors depicted emotions such as happy, sad, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and neutrality. From a total of 126 images, participants rated in terms of intensity and accuracy. Final software was developed with 28 images, and mean accuracy and reaction time were obtained. Friedman’s significance test revealed a significant effect of emotion on its different dimensions. This study helped establish a culturally sensitive emotion recognition tool with the Indian population, which can be used in mental health settings for screening purposes and aid in developing rehabilitation modules.