Abstract
Arousal is one of the dimensions of core affect and frequently used to describe experienced or observed emotional states. While arousal ratings of facial expressions are collected in many studies it is not well understood how arousal is displayed in or interpreted from facial expressions. In the context of socioemotional disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, this poses the question of a differential use of facial information for arousal perception. In this study, we demonstrate how automated face-tracking tools can be used to extract predictors of arousal judgments. We find moderate to strong correlations among all measures of static information on one hand and all measures of dynamic information on the other. Based on these results, we tested two measures, average distance to the neutral face and average facial movement speed, within and between neurotypical individuals (N = 401) and individuals with autism (N = 19). Distance to the neutral face was predictive of arousal in both groups. Lower mean arousal ratings were found for the autistic group, but no difference in correlation of the measures and arousal ratings could be found between groups. Results were replicated in an high autistic traits group. The findings suggest a qualitatively similar perception of arousal for individuals with and without autism. No correlations between valence ratings and any of the measures could be found, emphasizing the specificity of our tested measures. Distance and speed predictors share variability and thus speed should not be discarded as a predictor of arousal ratings.
Highlights
Arousal is a frequently used and long-standing (Duffy, 1957) concept in physiology and psychology
This means that participants with autism rated clips on average 4 points lower on the arousal scale, but it did not provide evidence for a difference in the strength of the distance and speed predictors between the groups. These results were replicated with the high autistic traits (HAT) sample, where the significance pattern stayed the same and the difference in arousal ratings as shown by the model intercept even increased slightly. These results indicate that individuals with autism make use of the same displacement and movement information as neurotypical individuals to judge arousal from facial expressions, and is consistent with the interpretation that arousal perception is qualitatively similar between groups
In the core affect framework (Russell and Barrett, 1999; Russell, 2003) arousal is used as a dimension to describe emotional states and, among other applications, used to rate emotional facial expressions
Summary
Arousal is a frequently used and long-standing (Duffy, 1957) concept in physiology and psychology. The core affect framework (Russell and Barrett, 1999; Russell, 2003) describes affective states only along the dimensions valence and arousal. In emotion research this framework is often used to quantify subjective affect experiences or observed affective states, for example from facial expressions (Britton et al, 2006). The valence axis of the core affect space shows systematic patterns with facial expression. We found that valence ratings have a strong correlation. Arousal Ratings of Facial Expressions (r = 0.87) with happiness ratings (Schneider et al, in preparation). The happiness of a facial expression in turn is mainly estimated from the mouth area in western cultures (Smith et al, 2005; Eisenbarth and Alpers, 2011; Jack et al, 2012), permitting an estimation of valence from facial expression via estimates of happiness
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