Emotion Recognition Capabilities Research Articles

Emotion recognition using machine learning: Opportunities and challenges for supporting those with autism or depression

Facial recognition technology, driven by advancements in machine learning, has become integral to various applications, from mobile security to access control. Recent developments in deep learning, particularly through convolutional and recurrent neural networks, have paved the way for enhanced emotion recognition capabilities. This paper explores the potential of facial emotion recognition (FER) and voice emotion recognition technologies, assessing their current state and future prospects. While FER techniques have evolved from traditional methods to deep learning approaches, and voice emotion recognition has shown promising results, challenges remain due to the inherent variability in human facial expressions and vocal characteristics. The paper further examines the impact of emotion recognition technologies on mental health, highlighting their potential to provide significant support to individuals with mental health disorders. By addressing the accuracy and application of these technologies, the research underscores the importance of continued innovation and careful implementation to maximize their benefits and mitigate potential risks. Ultimately, emotion recognition provides promising avenues for supporting those with mental illnesses. Aimed at fostering more personalized and effective interventions, these technologies hold the potential to revolutionize mental health care and improve the overall well-being of individuals.

Musician-AI partnership mediated by emotionally-aware smart musical instruments

The integration of emotion recognition capabilities within musical instruments can spur the emergence of novel art formats and services for musicians. This paper proposes the concept of emotionally-aware smart musical instruments, a class of musical devices embedding an artificial intelligence agent able to recognize the emotion contained in the musical signal. This spurs the emergence of novel services for musicians. Two prototypes of emotionally-aware smart piano and smart electric guitar were created, which embedded a recognition method for happiness, sadness, relaxation, aggressiveness and combination thereof. A user study, conducted with eleven pianists and eleven electric guitarists, revealed the strengths and limitations of the developed technology. On average musicians appreciated the proposed concept, who found its value in various musical activities. Most of participants tended to justify the system with respect to erroneous or partially erroneous classifications of the emotions they expressed, reporting to understand the reasons why a given output was produced. Some participants even seemed to trust more the system than their own judgments. Conversely, other participants requested to improve the accuracy, reliability and explainability of the system in order to achieve a higher degree of partnership with it. Our results suggest that, while desirable, perfect prediction of the intended emotion is not an absolute requirement for music emotion recognition to be useful in the construction of smart musical instruments.

FCAN : Speech emotion recognition network based on focused contrastive learning

Traditional speech emotion recognition (SER) models predominantly utilize cross-entropy loss for supervised optimization. Yet, given the limited size of SER datasets, relying solely on cross-entropy loss does not adequately capture the intricacies within the data. Moreover, conventional contrastive learning techniques, though improving performance, do not completely harness the inherent data structure across samples. To surmount these limitations, we introduce an innovative emotion recognition network founded on focused contrastive learning. Our model employs bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks to seize critical contextual dependencies. By integrating an attention mechanism, we adeptly merge the contextual features of dialogues with individual utterance attributes, forming a comprehensive multi-stage feature fusion framework. This strategy extracts more elaborate emotional features from the constrained dataset. Additionally, by amalgamating the focal loss function into our training protocol, we mitigate imbalanced sample issues to a degree. We further refine our contrastive loss function by enacting a weighted strategy for intra-dialogue category assignments, where higher penalty weights are ascribed to harder-to-identify categories, thus incentivizing the model to concentrate on distinguishing subtler category differences. This refinement significantly bolsters the model’s proficiency in learning various emotional feature distributions, thereby enhancing its emotion recognition capabilities. Experimental validation on IEMOCAP and MELD benchmark datasets underpins our model’s superiority.

Improving Speech Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

This project explores advanced techniques in speech recognition, focusing on emotion identification using Convolutional Neural Networks for improved accuracy and real-time processing efficiency. Emotion recognition from speech signals plays a crucial role in various applications, including human-computer interaction, customer service, mental health monitoring, and entertainment. This project proposes an innovative approach to emotion recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) applied to speech data. By leveraging advanced deep learning techniques, the proposed system aims to accurately identify and classify emotions conveyed through vocal expressions. The project begins with a comprehensive review of existing literature on emotion recognition and speech processing, identifying key challenges and opportunities in the field. Building upon prior research, the project introduces a novel CNN architecture optimized for emotion recognition tasks. This architecture is designed to extract relevant features from speech signals and capture subtle nuances indicative of different emotional states. One of the distinguishing features of the proposed approach is its multi-modal integration, which combines information from both audio and visual modalities to enhance emotion recognition accuracy. In addition to analysing speech signals, the system incorporates visual cues such as facial expressions and gestures, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the speaker's emotional state. Real-time processing efficiency is prioritized in the design of the system, ensuring prompt and responsive emotion recognition in interactive applications. Optimization techniques such as model quantization and lightweight architecture design are employed to minimize computational overhead while maintaining high accuracy. To address the variability and subjectivity of emotional expression, the system incorporates user-specific adaptation mechanisms. Through continuous learning and feedback integration, the system dynamically adapts to individual speakers' speech patterns and emotional characteristics, enhancing its ability to accurately recognize emotions in diverse contexts. The project also explores ensemble learning strategies to improve robustness and generalization performance. By combining predictions from multiple CNN models trained on diverse datasets, the system achieves greater resilience to variations in emotional expression and environmental factors. Ethical considerations, including privacy protection and responsible data handling, are integral aspects of the project's design and implementation. Measures are implemented to ensure the ethical collection, storage, and usage of speech data, safeguarding user privacy and maintaining trust in the system. Overall, the proposed system represents a significant advancement in emotion recognition technology, offering a sophisticated and versatile solution for accurately identifying emotions from speech signals. By leveraging deep learning techniques, multi-modal integration, real-time processing optimization, user-specific adaptation, and ensemble learning, the system demonstrates promising potential for various practical applications requiring robust and context-aware emotion recognition capabilities. Keywords: Speech Recognition, Emotion Identification, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Real-time Processing, Multi-modal Integration, User-specific Adaptation, Ensemble Learning, Deep Learning, Emotional Expression, Ethical Data Handling

Newman-Watts-Strogatz topology in deep echo state networks for speech emotion recognition

Cortical neural connectivity exhibits a small-world (SW) network topology. However, its role in neural information processing remains unclear. In this study, we investigate the learning performance of a Deep Echo State Network (DeepESN) that incorporates the Newman-Watts-Strogatz (NWS) graph topology as a reservoir. The short path length of the SW topology allows input information to reach output nodes faster, and the clustered arrangement of this topology can expand the range of the echo state property. Additionally, in this paper, we seek to identify the best set of these key factors, such as the spectral radius of the reservoir’s weight matrix and the hyperparameters neighbors' and probabilities. We evaluate the NWS-DeepESNs on four Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) tasks, which are RAVDESS, Emo-db, SAVEE, and TESS databases. By examining the NWS-DeepESN’s performance on SER tasks, we aim to determine the role of the NWS graph topology in enhancing neural information processing. The obtained results exhibited significant improvements in recognition accuracies (weighted and unweighted) with (76.45%, 75.79%), (87.89%, 87.14%), (99%, 98.62%), and (63%, 62.24%), respectively, for RAVDESS, Emo-db, SAVEE, and TESS databases. The proposed approach improves emotion recognition capabilities and yields more accurate results compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches.

Spontaneous Facial Behavior Analysis Using Deep Transformer-based Framework for Child–computer Interaction

A fascinating challenge in robotics-human interaction is imitating the emotion recognition capability of humans to robots with the aim to make human-robotics interaction natural, genuine and intuitive. To achieve the natural interaction in affective robots, human-machine interfaces, and autonomous vehicles, understanding our attitudes and opinions is very important, and it provides a practical and feasible path to realize the connection between machine and human. Multimodal interface that includes voice along with facial expression can manifest a large range of nuanced emotions compared to purely textual interfaces and provide a great value to improve the intelligence level of effective communication. Interfaces that fail to manifest or ignore user emotions may significantly impact the performance and risk being perceived as cold, socially inept, untrustworthy, and incompetent. To equip a child well for life, we need to help our children identify their feelings, manage them well, and express their needs in healthy, respectful, and direct ways. Early identification of emotional deficits can help to prevent low social functioning in children. In this work, we analyzed the child’s spontaneous behavior using multimodal facial expression and voice signal presenting multimodal transformer-based last feature fusion for facial behavior analysis in children to extract contextualized representations from RGB video sequence and Hematoxylin and eosin video sequence and then using these representations followed by pairwise concatenations of contextualized representations using cross-feature fusion technique to predict users emotions. To validate the performance of the proposed framework, we have performed experiments with the different pairwise concatenations of contextualized representations that showed significantly better performance than state-of-the-art method. Besides, we perform t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding visualization to visualize the discriminative feature in lower dimension space and probability density estimation to visualize the prediction capability of our proposed model.

Multimodal Facial Emotion Recognition Using Improved Convolution Neural Networks Model

In the quest for human-robot interaction (HRI), leading to the development of emotion recognition, learning, and analysis capabilities, robotics plays a significant role in human perception, attention, decision-making, and social communication. However, the accurate recognition of emotions in HRI remains a challenge. This is due to the coexistence of multiple sources of information in utilizing multimodal facial expressions and head poses as multiple convolutional neural networks (CNN) and deep learning are combined. This research analyzes and improves the robustness of emotion recognition, and proposes a novel approach that optimizes traditional deep neural networks that fall into poor local optima when optimizing the weightings of the deep neural network using standard methods. The proposed approach adaptively finds the better weightings of the network, resulting in a hybrid genetic algorithm with stochastic gradient descent (HGASGD). This hybrid algorithm combines the inherent, implicit parallelism of the genetic algorithm with the better global optimization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). An experiment shows the effectiveness of our proposed approach in providing complete emotion recognition through a combination of multimodal data, CNNs, and HGASGD, indicating that it represents a powerful tool in achieving interactions between humans and robotics. To validate and test the effectiveness of our proposed approach through experiments, the performance and reliability of our approach and two variants of HGASGD FER are compared using a large dataset of facial images. Our approach integrates multimodal information from facial expressions and head poses, enabling the system to recognize emotions better. The results show that CNN-HGASGD outperforms CNNs-SGD and other existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of FER.

Interaction between Functional Connectivity and Neural Excitability in Autism: A Novel Framework for Computational Modeling and Application to Biological Data.

Functional connectivity (FC) and neural excitability may interact to affect symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We tested this hypothesis with neural network simulations, and applied it with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A hierarchical recurrent neural network embodying predictive processing theory was subjected to a facial emotion recognition task. Neural network simulations examined the effects of FC and neural excitability on changes in neural representations by developmental learning, and eventually on ASD-like performance. Next, by mapping each neural network condition to subject subgroups on the basis of fMRI parameters, the association between ASD-like performance in the simulation and ASD diagnosis in the corresponding subject subgroup was examined. In the neural network simulation, the more homogeneous the neural excitability of the lower-level network, the more ASD-like the performance (reduced generalization and emotion recognition capability). In addition, in homogeneous networks, the higher the FC, the more ASD-like performance, while in heterogeneous networks, the higher the FC, the less ASD-like performance, demonstrating that FC and neural excitability interact. As an underlying mechanism, neural excitability determines the generalization capability of top-down prediction, and FC determines whether the model's information processing will be top-down prediction-dependent or bottom-up sensory-input dependent. In fMRI datasets, ASD was actually more prevalent in subject subgroups corresponding to the network condition showing ASD-like performance. The current study suggests an interaction between FC and neural excitability, and presents a novel framework for computational modeling and biological application of a developmental learning process underlying cognitive alterations in ASD.

Mm-DSF: A Method for Identifying Dangerous Driving Behaviors Based on the Lateral Fusion of Micro-Doppler Features Combined.

To address the dangerous driving behaviors prevalent among current car drivers, it is necessary to provide real-time, accurate warning and correction of driver's driving behaviors in a small, movable, and enclosed space. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting dangerous behaviors based on frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar (mm-DSF). The highly packaged millimeter-wave radar chip has good in-vehicle emotion recognition capability. The acquired millimeter-wave differential frequency signal is Fourier-transformed to obtain the intermediate frequency signal. The physiological decomposition of the local micro-Doppler feature spectrum of the target action is then used as the eigenvalue. Matrix signal intensity and clutter filtering are performed by analyzing the signal echo model of the input channel. The signal classification is based on the estimation and variety of the feature vectors of the target key actions using a modified and optimized level fusion method of the SlowFast dual-channel network. Nine typical risky driving behaviors were set up by the Dula Hazard Questionnaire and TEIQue-SF, and the accuracy of the classification results of the self-built dataset was analyzed to verify the high robustness of the method. The recognition accuracy of this method increased by 1.97% compared with the traditional method.

Subject independent emotion recognition using EEG and physiological signals – a comparative study

PurposeThe aim of this study is to investigate subject independent emotion recognition capabilities of EEG and peripheral physiological signals namely: electroocoulogram (EOG), electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA), temperature, plethysmograph and respiration. The experiments are conducted on both modalities independently and in combination. This study arranges the physiological signals in order based on the prediction accuracy obtained on test data using time and frequency domain features.Design/methodology/approachDEAP dataset is used in this experiment. Time and frequency domain features of EEG and physiological signals are extracted, followed by correlation-based feature selection. Classifiers namely – Naïve Bayes, logistic regression, linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, logit boost and stacking are trained on the selected features. Based on the performance of the classifiers on the test set, the best modality for each dimension of emotion is identified.Findings The experimental results with EEG as one modality and all physiological signals as another modality indicate that EEG signals are better at arousal prediction compared to physiological signals by 7.18%, while physiological signals are better at valence prediction compared to EEG signals by 3.51%. The valence prediction accuracy of EOG is superior to zygomaticus electromyography (zEMG) and EDA by 1.75% at the cost of higher number of electrodes. This paper concludes that valence can be measured from the eyes (EOG) while arousal can be measured from the changes in blood volume (plethysmograph). The sorted order of physiological signals based on arousal prediction accuracy is plethysmograph, EOG (hEOG + vEOG), vEOG, hEOG, zEMG, tEMG, temperature, EMG (tEMG + zEMG), respiration, EDA, while based on valence prediction accuracy the sorted order is EOG (hEOG + vEOG), EDA, zEMG, hEOG, respiration, tEMG, vEOG, EMG (tEMG + zEMG), temperature and plethysmograph.Originality/valueMany of the emotion recognition studies in literature are subject dependent and the limited subject independent emotion recognition studies in the literature report an average of leave one subject out (LOSO) validation result as accuracy. The work reported in this paper sets the baseline for subject independent emotion recognition using DEAP dataset by clearly specifying the subjects used in training and test set. In addition, this work specifies the cut-off score used to classify the scale as low or high in arousal and valence dimensions. Generally, statistical features are used for emotion recognition using physiological signals as a modality, whereas in this work, time and frequency domain features of physiological signals and EEG are used. This paper concludes that valence can be identified from EOG while arousal can be predicted from plethysmograph.

A Systematic Review on Emotion Recognition System Using Physiological Signals: Data Acquisition and Methodology

Emotion recognition systems (ERS) have become a popular research field to contribute to human-machine interaction in different areas. Different kinds of applications on ERS can serve different purposes. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) are the technologies behind such applications. The main objective of this study is to enable researchers and developers to search for the most suitable options to develop an emotional state recognition system. More specifically, this paper presents work on ERS, which is built using physiological signals extracted from biosensors. It also presents details of how the extracted physiological signals are used to identify the user's emotional state. In this review, the sensors are categorized based on their modality: contact-based sensors and contactless sensors. Next, the ERS process is presented together with the reported results for each described technique. Articles from four different research databases were reviewed, of which 147 articles from 2009 to 2021 were referred to that are related to ERS using physiological signals. This paper should be significant for researchers developing systems that integrate human emotion recognition capability. The findings reported here can guide them in choosing suitable methods for their systems. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2022-06-05-017 Full Text: PDF

Research on Feature Fusion Speech Emotion Recognition Technology for Smart Teaching

At present, there are numerous intelligent teaching applications based on various advanced pattern recognition technologies, such as face sign-in, classroom action recognition, student facial expression recognition, and other systems which have been gradually applied to major schools. Speech emotion recognition can analyze the characteristics of current teaching emotions, so as to discover the rules and details of teachers’ grasp of emotions. In order to realize the task of emotion classification in the process of intelligent teaching through machine learning technology, a teaching speech emotion recognition method with multifeature fusion and deep learning is proposed. The proposed method front-end processes the speech spectrum features in a multifeature fusion manner and combines them with an artificial neural network classifier to form the final speech emotion recognition model. First, after speech preprocessing, three features are selected and fused features using a network structure trained by parallel subnetworks. Then, the classifier used is a hybrid neural network classifier combining a convolutional neural network and a recurrent neural network. Finally, 100 open web courses were used to train and test the model. The test results show that the hybrid neural network sound model using multifeature fusion has good teaching speech emotion recognition capability.

Experience with an Affective Robot Assistant for Children with Hearing Disabilities.

This study presents an assistive robotic system enhanced with emotion recognition capabilities for children with hearing disabilities. The system is designed and developed for the audiometry tests and rehabilitation of children in a clinical setting and includes a social humanoid robot (Pepper), an interactive interface, gamified audiometry tests, sensory setup and a machine/deep learning based emotion recognition module. Three scenarios involving conventional setup, tablet setup and setup with the robot+tablet are evaluated with 16 children having cochlear implant or hearing aid. Several machine learning techniques and deep learning models are used for the classification of the three test setups and for the classification of the emotions (pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) of children using the recorded physiological signals by E4 wristband. The results show that the collected signals during the tests can be separated successfully and the positive and negative emotions of children can be better distinguished when they interact with the robot than in the other two setups. In addition, the children’s objective and subjective evaluations as well as their impressions about the robot and its emotional behaviors are analyzed and discussed extensively.

Higher Right Hemisphere Gamma Band Lateralization and Suggestion of a Sensitive Period for Vocal Auditory Emotional Stimuli Recognition in Unilateral Cochlear Implant Children: An EEG Study.

In deaf children, huge emphasis was given to language; however, emotional cues decoding and production appear of pivotal importance for communication capabilities. Concerning neurophysiological correlates of emotional processing, the gamma band activity appears a useful tool adopted for emotion classification and related to the conscious elaboration of emotions. Starting from these considerations, the following items have been investigated: (i) whether emotional auditory stimuli processing differs between normal-hearing (NH) children and children using a cochlear implant (CI), given the non-physiological development of the auditory system in the latter group; (ii) whether the age at CI surgery influences emotion recognition capabilities; and (iii) in light of the right hemisphere hypothesis for emotional processing, whether the CI side influences the processing of emotional cues in unilateral CI (UCI) children. To answer these matters, 9 UCI (9.47 ± 2.33 years old) and 10 NH (10.95 ± 2.11 years old) children were asked to recognize nonverbal vocalizations belonging to three emotional states: positive (achievement, amusement, contentment, relief), negative (anger, disgust, fear, sadness), and neutral (neutral, surprise). Results showed better performances in NH than UCI children in emotional states recognition. The UCI group showed increased gamma activity lateralization index (LI) (relative higher right hemisphere activity) in comparison to the NH group in response to emotional auditory cues. Moreover, LI gamma values were negatively correlated with the percentage of correct responses in emotion recognition. Such observations could be explained by a deficit in UCI children in engaging the left hemisphere for more demanding emotional task, or alternatively by a higher conscious elaboration in UCI than NH children. Additionally, for the UCI group, there was no difference between the CI side and the contralateral side in gamma activity, but a higher gamma activity in the right in comparison to the left hemisphere was found. Therefore, the CI side did not appear to influence the physiologic hemispheric lateralization of emotional processing. Finally, a negative correlation was shown between the age at the CI surgery and the percentage of correct responses in emotion recognition and then suggesting the occurrence of a sensitive period for CI surgery for best emotion recognition skills development.

Implicit facial emotion recognition of fear and anger in obesity.

Previous evidence about facial emotion recognition capability in obesity is few and not conclusive. We investigated the capability of female individuals affected by obesity to recognize the emotions of fear and anger through a facial emotion recognition task grounded on the implicit redundant target effect. 20 women affected by obesity and 20 healthy-weight women were enrolled. We administered an implicit facial emotion recognition task. Both reaction time and level of accuracy were computed. Moreover, the level of alexithymia was measured through the standard questionnaire. Selective difficulties in recognizing the emotion of fear were observed in participants with obesity, when their performance was contrasted with healthy-weight controls. Instead, they showed the implicit redundant target effect when anger was the target. However, the two groups reported globally similar scores at the standard questionnaire relative to the level of alexithymia. Our result might agree with the hypothesis about affected individuals' difficulties in being attentive to negative facial emotions, and specifically in the case of fearful expression. This study might encourage future research in which emotional processing will be investigated through subjective judgments and implicit/objective measurements. Experimental study.

CERG: Chinese Emotional Response Generator with Retrieval Method.

The dialogue system has always been one of the important topics in the domain of artificial intelligence. So far, most of the mature dialogue systems are task-oriented based, while non-task-oriented dialogue systems still have a lot of room for improvement. We propose a data-driven non-task-oriented dialogue generator “CERG” based on neural networks. This model has the emotion recognition capability and can generate corresponding responses. The data set we adopt comes from the NTCIR-14 STC-3 CECG subtask, which contains more than 1.7 million Chinese Weibo post-response pairs and 6 emotion categories. We try to concatenate the post and the response with the emotion, then mask the response part of the input text character by character to emulate the encoder-decoder framework. We use the improved transformer blocks as the core to build the model and add regularization methods to alleviate the problems of overcorrection and exposure bias. We introduce the retrieval method to the inference process to improve the semantic relevance of generated responses. The results of the manual evaluation show that our proposed model can make different responses to different emotions to improve the human-computer interaction experience. This model can be applied to lots of domains, such as automatic reply robots of social application.

Characteristics of human auditory model based on compensation of glottal features in speech emotion recognition

The speech signal carries emotional message during its production. With the analysis on relation between sound production and glottis, the paper has introduced the glottal features into speech emotion recognition, proposed the model where the glottis is used for compensation of glottal features, and extracted the feature of Glottal Compensation to Zero Crossings with Maximal Teager Energy Operator (GCZCMT). Two experiments have been designed, including that: firstly, the single emotional speech databases of TYUT and Berlin are respectively used for experiment (the purpose of such experiment is to research the emotion recognition capability of GCZCMT feature, and the experimental results show that GCZCMT feature is a feature possibly and effectively distinguishing emotional state); secondly, this experiment is one of mixing speech database (the purpose of such experiment is to research the emotion recognition capability of GCZCMT feature on ross-database language, and the experimental results show that the database dependency of GCZCMT feature is the minimum, and such feature is more suitable for actual complex language environment, and has the higher practical value.

Emotion recognition and emergent leadership: Unraveling mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions

This study examines the complex connection between individuals' emotion recognition capability and their emergence as leaders. It is hypothesized that emotion recognition and extraversion interactively relate with an individual's task coordination behavior which, in turn, influences the likelihood of emerging as a leader. In other words, we cast task coordination as a mediating mechanism in the joint relationship between emotion recognition and extraversion, on the one hand, and leader emergence, on the other. Study hypotheses were tested using multisource data from two diverse, independent samples. Study 1 supports the hypothesized relationships in a sample of student project teams in the Netherlands, and Study 2 constructively replicates the proposed model using student participants in an assessment center in the United States. These findings were obtained using a performance-based test of emotion recognition and controlling for a battery of known covariates.

Learning emotion recognition from canines? Two for the road

Abstract The ability to recognize emotions is a prerequisite for interpersonal interaction and essential for emotional competencies. The present study aimed at exploring the possibility of enhancing the emotion recognition capability of human beings by using an animal-assisted intervention focusing on emotional expressions of dogs. A pre–post design was applied to 32 children aged 5-7 years and 34 adults aged 19-45 years, who received the multiprofessional animal-assisted intervention in groups of 6-12 participants. To measure emotion recognition, a computerized test, Vienna Emotion Recognition Tasks, was used to identify the emotion recognition capacity of the participants before and after 12 weeks of training. The hypotheses were tested using a general linear model with repeated measures, and effect sizes were calculated to gain further insight. The effect size eta square was used to analyze the variables on practical relevance. Results showed that the highest changes with relevant effect sizes in the adult group concerned the correct identification of anger and fear as well as the overall number of correctly identified facial expressions, including a decrease in latency to respond. The children also significantly increased their capacity for the recognition of anger and fear as well as disgust and neutral facial expressions. Additionally, they identified 5 more emotions correctly after the training and also decreased their latency to respond. The participants identified more emotions correctly and decreased their latency to respond significantly, even though only facial and/or emotional expressions of dogs were part of the program. A generalization process from human–dog interaction to human–human interaction seems to occur.