The Qingdao Preschooler Facial Expression Set: Acquisition and Validation of Chinese Children's Facial Emotion Stimuli.

Jie Chen,Yulin Zhang,Guozhen Zhao

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.554821

Abstract

Traditional research on emotion-face processing has primarily focused on the expression of basic emotions using adult emotional face stimuli. Stimulus sets featuring child faces or emotions other than basic emotions are rare. The current study describes the acquisition and evaluation of the Qingdao Preschooler Facial Expression (QPFE) set, a facial stimulus set with images featuring 54 Chinese preschoolers’ emotion expressions. The set includes 712 standardized color photographs of six basic emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, surprise, and disgust), five discrete positive emotions (interest, contentment, relief, pride, and amusement), and a neutral expression. The validity of the pictures was examined based on 43 adult raters’ online evaluation, including agreement between designated emotions and raters’ labels, as well as intensity and representativeness scores. Overall, these data should contribute to the developmental and cross-cultural research on children’s emotion expressions and provide insights for future research on positive emotions.

Highlights

Facial expression, the most prominent cue of emotion, has been studied extensively for decades within the scope of face processing, emotion perception, as well as the impact of emotion on cognition and socialization (Adolphs, 2002; Nelson et al, 2003; Todd et al, 2008)
Based on the six basic human emotions that were identified by Ekman et al (1971), the first facial stimulus set of emotion expressions, pictures of facial affect (POFA), was created (Ekman and Friesen, 1976) and has been widely studied in the traditional face-emotion research
The overall mean agreement rate was one of the criteria to judge the validity of a stimulus set with other existing ones

Summary

Introduction

The most prominent cue of emotion, has been studied extensively for decades within the scope of face processing, emotion perception, as well as the impact of emotion on cognition and socialization (Adolphs, 2002; Nelson et al, 2003; Todd et al, 2008). Designing a highly standardized facial stimulus set is crucial to the reliability of research on emotion expression and perception (Calvo and Lundqvist, 2008; Sabatinelli et al, 2011). Despite the increase of stimulus sets featuring adult emotional faces, children’s facial databases remained poorly developed in the early years. Evidence including facial discrimination ability (Macchi Cassia, 2011; Macchi Cassia et al, 2012), face responding time (Benoit et al, 2012), functional MRI (fMRI) showing brain activation (Blakemore, 2008; Hoehl et al, 2010; Marusak et al, 2013), and event-related potential (ERP) studies (Taylor et al, 2004; Leppänen et al, 2007; Miki et al, 2015) all highlighted the importance of using stimulus sets featuring children’s faces

Results

Discussion

Conclusion