Sighted People Recognizing Emotions in Facial Expression Images of People With Visual Disabilities Via Cyberspace

Abstract

As technology advances today, there are many opportunities for people to communicate in cyberspace (e.g., videoconferencing) regardless of visual ability/disability. People share various information including facial expressions that are considered essential for social interaction. Despite the importance of facial expressions in conveying emotions, there is limited knowledge on how sighted people perceive the emotions of people with visual disabilities from their facial expressions online. To address the knowledge gap, this study showed sighted participants facial expression images of people with visual disabilities via Zoom and asked them to report the emotion they perceived for each image. Afterward, participants were educated about the facial modeling from a previous study and shown another set of facial expression images of people with visual disabilities. Participants were asked to report the emotion they perceived in each image. This study found many cases of incongruently perceived emotions, in which participants perceived emotions differently from the facially expressed emotions of people with visual disabilities. Yet, after education, participants were more likely to congruently perceive emotions. The research findings would be beneficial to many stakeholders in the domain of inclusive communication for everyone in cyberspace.