Validation of the P1vital® Faces Set for Use as Stimuli in Tests of Facial Emotion Recognition.

Julia A Romano,Suzanne Higgs,Andreea Raslescu,Colin T Dourish,Gerard R Dawson,Jonathan A Kingslake,Jason M Thomas,Laura Vosper

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.663763

Julia A Romano, Suzanne Higgs + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.663763

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Abstract

BackgroundNegative bias in facial emotion recognition is a well-established concept in mental disorders such as depression. However, existing face sets of emotion recognition tests may be of limited use in international research, which could benefit from more contemporary and diverse alternatives. Here, we developed and provide initial validation for the P1vital® Affective Faces set (PAFs) as a contemporary alternative to the widely-used Pictures of Facial Affect (PoFA).MethodsThe PAFs was constructed of 133 color photographs of facial expressions of ethnically-diverse trained actors and compared with the PoFA, comprised of 110 black and white photographs of facial expressions of generally Caucasian actors. Sixty-one recruits were asked to classify faces from both sets over six emotions (happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust, surprise) varying in intensity in 10% increments from 0 to 100%.ResultsParticipants were significantly more accurate in identifying correct emotions viewing faces from the PAFs. In both sets, participants identified happy faces more accurately than fearful faces, were least likely to misclassify facial expressions as happy and most likely to misclassify all emotions at low intensity as neutral. Accuracy in identifying facial expressions improved with increasing emotion intensity for both sets, reaching peaks at 60 and 80% intensity for the PAFs and PoFA, respectively. The study was limited by small sizes and age-range of participants and ethnic diversity of actors.ConclusionsThe PAFs successfully depicted a range of emotional expressions with improved performance over the PoFA and may be used as a contemporary set in facial expression recognition tests.

Highlights

The neural and psychological mechanisms underlying recognition of emotional expressions has been a subject of investigation for more than 100 years [1, 2]
The current study aimed to identify equivalence between the P1vital® Affective Faces set (PAFs) and the Pictures of Facial Affect (PoFA) in the Facial Emotion Recognition TestTask (FERT) task as facial expression stimuli
We investigated whether the participants’ ability to recognize facial expressions varied between the PAFs and PoFA face sets, with the expectation that accuracy rates that are equivalent between the two face sets or favor the PAFs would provide initial empirical support for the validity of our novel face set

Summary

Introduction

The neural and psychological mechanisms underlying recognition of emotional expressions has been a subject of investigation for more than 100 years [1, 2]. This task displays faces that participants must categorize into one of six emotional categories based on their expression: happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust, surprise and neutral. The FERT has been the subject of considerable recent research interest since performance on the task has been shown to be influenced by subject moods [4]. Low mood may lead a subject to interpret faces with ambiguous or neutral expressions as displaying a “negative” emotion, such as sadness, anger or fear. Existing face sets of emotion recognition tests may be of limited use in international research, which could benefit from more contemporary and diverse alternatives. We developed and provide initial validation for the P1vital® Affective Faces set (PAFs) as a contemporary alternative to the widely-used Pictures of Facial Affect (PoFA)

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