Abstract
There is increasing interest in clarifying how different face emotion expressions are perceived by people from different cultures, of different ages and sex. However, scant availability of well-controlled emotional face stimuli from non-Western populations limit the evaluation of cultural differences in face emotion perception and how this might be modulated by age and sex differences. We present a database of East Asian face expression stimuli, enacted by young and older, male and female, Taiwanese using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Combined with a prior database, this present database consists of 90 identities with happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised and neutral expressions amounting to 628 photographs. Twenty young and 24 older East Asian raters scored the photographs for intensities of multiple-dimensions of emotions and induced affect. Multivariate analyses characterized the dimensionality of perceived emotions and quantified effects of age and sex. We also applied commercial software to extract computer-based metrics of emotions in photographs. Taiwanese raters perceived happy faces as one category, sad, angry, and disgusted expressions as one category, and fearful and surprised expressions as one category. Younger females were more sensitive to face emotions than younger males. Whereas, older males showed reduced face emotion sensitivity, older female sensitivity was similar or accentuated relative to young females. Commercial software dissociated six emotions according to the FACS demonstrating that defining visual features were present. Our findings show that East Asians perceive a different dimensionality of emotions than Western-based definitions in face recognition software, regardless of age and sex. Critically, stimuli with detailed cultural norms are indispensable in interpreting neural and behavioral responses involving human facial expression processing. To this end, we add to the tools, which are available upon request, for conducting such research.
Highlights
Emotions conveyed in facial expressions are perceived differently by individuals of different cultural backgrounds (Biehl et al, 1997; Jack et al, 2012), age and sex (Hall and Matsumoto, 2004; Isaacowitz et al, 2017), and with different in-group/outgroup biases (Lazerus et al, 2016)
We considered the potential influence of interpersonal collectivism in East Asian perceptual processing (Goh and Park, 2009; Grossmann et al, 2014) on in-group/out-group biases to do with rater and face stimuli age and sex
Participants Taiwanese facial emotional expression stimuli in this study comprised a combination of photographs from an existing database (Chen et al, 2013) and photographs acquired in this present study
Summary
Emotions conveyed in facial expressions are perceived differently by individuals of different cultural backgrounds (Biehl et al, 1997; Jack et al, 2012), age and sex (Hall and Matsumoto, 2004; Isaacowitz et al, 2017), and with different in-group/outgroup biases (Lazerus et al, 2016). Multi-dimensional emotion judgments should reflect three or four, rather than six, categories of emotion perceived by East Asians when rating face expressions based on the FACS approach (Jack et al, 2016). We present and evaluate a set of East Asian face emotion stimuli based on expressions enacted by Taiwanese young and older adult males and females. To validate that visual features associated with the different basic emotion categories were present in our Taiwanese face stimuli, we applied a commercial face emotion recognition software that was developed using the FACS criteria (Face Reader, Noldus Information Technology, The Netherlands; Langner et al, 2010) and compared the algorithm’s performance against our human raters. Face stimuli along with the rating profile norms are available upon request
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