Pictures Of Faces Research Articles

How Weeping Influences the Perception of Facial Expressions: The Signal Value of Tears

Emotional tears have been proposed to serve as a signal of distress, appeasement, and helplessness, which promotes prosocial responses in observers. They may also facilitate the perception of sadness. A still unanswered question is what information tears convey about emotional states when they are combined with different muscular facial expressions. The current study evaluated three hypotheses: Tears facilitate inferences about (a) emotion intensity in general (b) sadness in particular, or (c) helplessness-related appraisal and behavioral intentions. In the first experiment, participants viewed pictures of (non)tearful real and artificial faces displaying anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral state. They had to report which of the seven expressions they recognized, and to rate its intensity, sincerity, and felt empathy. Tears appeared to facilitate the perception of sadness, but also of anger and fear, while they decreased the perception of disgust and surprise. The ratings of the intensity, the perceived sincerity, and the experienced empathy followed a similar pattern. In the second experiment, participants had to indicate if briefly (50 ms) presented (non)tearful faces showed a particular expression, and we measured their accuracy and reaction times. The results of the first experiment were not corroborated. Overall, the findings lend most support to the appraisal/behavioral intentions hypothesis and less support for the intensity and the sadness enhancement hypotheses.

Visual Place Recognition From Eye Reflection

The cornea in the human eye reflects incoming environmental light, which means we can obtain information about the surrounding environment from the corneal reflection in facial images. In recent years, as the quality of consumer cameras increases, this has caused privacy concerns in terms of identifying the people around the subject or where the photo is taken. This paper investigates the security risk of eye corneal reflection images: specifically, visual place recognition from eye reflection images. First, we constructed two datasets containing pairs of scene and corneal reflection images. The first dataset is taken in a virtual environment. We showed pre-captured scene images in a 180-degree surrounding display system and took corneal reflections from subjects. The second dataset is taken in an outdoor environment. We developed several visual place recognition algorithms, including CNN-based image descriptors featuring a naive Siamese network and AFD-Net combined with entire image feature representations including VLAD and NetVLAD, and compared the results. We found that AFD-Net+VLAD performed the best and was able to accurately determine the scene in 73.08% of the top-five candidate scenes. These results demonstrate the potential to estimate the location at which a facial picture was taken, which simultaneously leads to a) positive applications such as the localization of a robot while conversing with persons and b) negative scenarios including the security risk of uploading facial images to the public.

Joint Face Retrieval System Based On a New Quadruplet Network in Videos of Multi-Camera

At present, a large number of off-line videos is stored in the server of surveillance network. In order to retrieve the target face in these massive videos frames, the face retrieval system is designed. A new Quadruplet Network is constructed by changing the RELU structure of CNN network and training the new Quadruplet Network to acquire the depth features. Join with the online fugitive face picture that launched online to initiate the wanted, with the help of the depth feature contrast to launch the Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR). The new Quadruplet Network converges faster than familiar networks such as Alexnet, Googlenet, VGGNet and ResNet. Because of the shared weight design of the network, the retrieval has a high precision, recall and the retrieval rate. Image depth features can be shared quickly online between the cameras. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective, with an accuracy of 98.74% and a precision of 99.54%, and a frame rate of 28 FPS.

A Descriptive Analysis of Barriers Faced by Females in Acquiring Higher Education; A Study of District Zhob, Baluchistan in Pakistan

The current research was centered on the scholarly issues and social barriers faced by female students to get affirmation in higher education. The study expected to discover the difficulties, which the respondents needed to face to conquer the social impediments in getting advanced education. The review concentrated on huge number of social obstructions and difficulties, budgetary issues and scholastic issues that female needed to confront. Quantitative research approach was utilized to uncover the experience of respondents which they encountered while getting affirmation in college. The research was being conducted in District Zhob, Baluchistan Province, since it was encompassed by for the most part country Areas. Population of the present review comprised of the female understudies contemplating in different instructive organizations. The discoveries demonstrate that different variables in charge of social prohibition of young ladies from education area in Pakistan incorporate preservationist state of mind of family and inclination to kid's training. Not with standing this, female understudies likewise tended to face impression of their families about co-education as social and religious variables to advanced education in Pakistan. The focus acknowledged with this class was "saw fears and dangers to family respect". As the individuals from conservative society, families had for the most part negative demeanor for females towards advanced education.

Wizerunek malowany frazeologią (na przykładzie języka ukraińskiego)

The metaphorical title A Picture Painted in Phraseology is meant to refer to the created picture of EMOTIONS, though the material used here is not paint, but the phrasemes employed in the description of EMOTIONS. By default, the phraseology of EMOTIONS is destined to create their picture. This picture is usually conventional since phrasemes are linguistically well entrenched and conventional. The correlation between the appearance of an experiencer, the picture of his or her face and behaviour, and his or her emotional state becomes a basis for the creation of numerous phrasemes, which are indicative of this correlation. The picture exists both in language and cognition. Phrasemes produce a specific picture of an experiencer who undergoes an emotion in such a way that one may argue that a picture is actually painted in phraseology. The final result is the picture of FACE and BODY, displaying joy, sadness, fear or surprise, which is exclusively characteristic of a particular emotion

Facial radiance influences facial attractiveness and affective impressions of faces.

ObjectiveFacial attractiveness has been reported to be influenced by visual features such as facial shape and the colour and texture of the skin. However, no empirical studies have examined the effects of facial skin radiance on facial attractiveness. The present study investigated whether types of skin reflection (i.e. radiant, oily and shiny, and matte) and the position of the reflection on the face influence facial attractiveness and other affective impressions.MethodsA total of 160 female participants (1) estimated the ages and (2) evaluated attractiveness and other impressions of unfamiliar female faces in a total of seven skin reflection conditions. These conditions incorporated three types of reflection (i.e. radiant, oily and shiny, and matte) and three positions of the reflection on the face (i.e. entire facial skin, only cheeks, and only T‐zone).ResultsThe facial images of radiance on entire faces were rated as appearing younger than the facial images of oily shine on entire faces and the matte faces. Attractiveness ratings and other positive impressions increased in the order of the matte (ranked lowest), the oily shine on entire face, and the radiance on entire face (ranked highest) conditions. The reflection position also influenced facial attractiveness: attractiveness ratings and other positive impressions were higher in the radiance on entire face condition than in the radiant cheeks and the radiant T‐zone conditions. Interestingly, the radiant cheek faces were rated more radiant and healthier but less feminine and less bright than the radiant T‐zone faces.ConclusionThese results suggest that facial radiance enhances facial attractiveness and conveys a wide variety of positive impressions on the observer. The magnitude of the effects of cheek radiance and T‐zone radiance differs across various affective impressions. Nevertheless, the results demonstrate that cheek and the T‐zone radiance both contribute to higher attractiveness and other positive impressions of the radiance on entire faces. We believe that our findings can contribute as a guide to the enhancement of positive facial impressions by means of skin radiance, thereby leading to a better understanding of the value of skincare and base makeup.

Potential Neural Mediators of Mom Power Parenting Intervention Effects on Maternal Intersubjectivity and Stress Resilience.

Stress resilience in parenting depends on the parent's capacity to understand subjective experiences in self and child, namely intersubjectivity, which is intimately related to mimicking other's affective expressions (i. e., mirroring). Stress can worsen parenting by potentiating problems that can impair intersubjectivity, e.g., problems of “over-mentalizing” (misattribution of the child's behaviors) and “under-coupling” (inadequate child-oriented mirroring). Previously we have developed Mom Power (MP) parenting intervention to promote maternal intersubjectivity and reduce parenting stress. This study aimed to elucidate neural mechanisms underlying the effects of MP with a novel Child Face Mirroring Task (CFMT) in functional magnetic-resonance-imaging settings. In CFMT, the participants responded to own and other's child's facial pictures in three task conditions: (1) empathic mirroring (Join), (2) non-mirroring observing (Observe), and (3) voluntary responding (React). In each condition, each child's neutral, ambiguous, distressed, and joyful expressions were repeatedly displayed. We examined the CFMT-related neural responses in a sample of healthy mothers (n = 45) in Study 1, and MP effects on CFMT with a pre-intervention (T1) and post-intervention (T2) design in two groups, MP (n = 19) and Control (n = 17), in Study 2. We found that, from T1 to T2, MP (vs. Control) decreased parenting stress, decreased dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) during own-child-specific voluntary responding (React to Own vs. Other's Child), and increased activity in the frontoparietal cortices, midbrain, nucleus accumbens, and amygdala during own-child-specific empathic mirroring (Join vs. Observe of Own vs. Other's Child). We identified that MP effects on parenting stress were potentially mediated by T1-to-T2 changes in: (1) the left superior-temporal-gyrus differential responses in the contrast of Join vs. Observe of own (vs. other's) child, (2) the dmPFC-PAG (periaqueductal gray) differential functional connectivity in the same contrast, and (3) the left amygdala differential responses in the contrast of Join vs. Observe of own (vs. other's) child's joyful vs. distressed expressions. We discussed these results in support of the notion that MP reduces parenting stress via changing neural activities related to the problems of “over-mentalizing” and “under-coupling.” Additionally, we discussed theoretical relationships between parenting stress and intersubjectivity in a novel dyadic active inference framework in a two-agent system to guide future research.

Odor-evoked hedonic contexts influence the discrimination of facial expressions in the human brain

The influence of odor valence on expressive-face perception remains unclear. Here, three “valenced” odor contexts (pleasant, unpleasant, control) were diffused while scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded in 18 participants presented with expressive faces alternating at a 6-Hz rate. One facial expression (happiness, disgust or neutrality) repeatedly arose every 6 face pictures to isolate its discrimination from other expressions at 1 Hz and harmonics in the EEG spectrum. The amplitude of the brain response to neutrality was larger in the pleasant vs. control odor context, and fewer electrodes responded in the unpleasant odor context. The number of responding electrodes was reduced for disgust in both odor contexts. The response to happiness was unchanged between odor conditions. Overall, these observations suggest that valenced odors influence the neural discrimination of facial expressions depending on both face and odor hedonic valence, especially for the emotionally ambiguous neutral expression.

Mild to moderate levels of anxiety in a healthy population cohort are related to face recognition with negative emotions and white matter integrity

AbstractBackgroundThe face recognition tasks were applied to test the healthy population cohort with mild to moderate levels of anxiety and they underwent MRI scans to evaluate their brains' white matter integrity.MethodMAP‐MRI analysis applied to estimate diffusion indexes Generalised Fractional Anisotropy (GFA) of segmented white matter tracts in a healthy (N=174) population‐based sample (mean MMSE 28.39) from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam‐CAN) data including normal adults ages 18‐88 to examine microstructural properties of specific association fiber tracts involved in face recognition processing. Half sample (n=88) had anxiety symptoms ( Hospital Anxiety Scale 9.7) and half sample (n=88) were matched with age and sex and without anxiety symptoms. Two kinds of behavioral face tests to white matter measures including three pairs of association tracts, namely inferior fronto‐occipital fasciculus (IFOF), inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and uncinated fasciculus (UF). The two kinds of behavioral face tests applied were Benton Test of Facial Recognition which assesses the ability to match pictures of unfamiliar faces with variation of head orientation and lighting, and face recognition test of emotion assessing recognition of positive emotion (happiness), negative emotions (angry, disgust, fear, and sad) and surprise emotion. Paired sample t test were applied to compare the two groups' HAS, behavioral tests, and GFA of white matter tracts.ResultPaired t test results showed hospital Anxiety Scale, mean reaction time (RT) of face recognition test in negative emotion, GFA of left IFOF and left UF were significantly different in two groups. Pearson correlation analysis showed mean RT of face recognition test in negative emotion was significantly negative correlated with GFA of left UF.ConclusionHealthy life‐span population cohort with mild to moderate anxiety symptoms spent longer time recognizing faces with negative emotions and white matter integrity of the specific tract UF reflected this characteristic. There was brain‐behavior relationship.

Facial Stereotype Bias Is Mitigated by Training

People automatically infer others’ personality (e.g., trustworthiness) based on facial appearance, and such facial stereotype biases predict real-world consequences across political, legal, and business domains. The present research tested whether these biases can be mitigated through counterstereotype training aimed at reconfiguring the associations between specific facial appearances and social traits. Across six studies and a replication, a behavioral counterstereotype training consistently reduced or eliminated facial stereotype biases for White male faces in the context of economic trust games, hiring decisions, and even automatic evaluations assessed via evaluative priming. Together, the results demonstrate a fundamental malleability in facial stereotyping related to trustworthiness, with a minimal training able to mitigate the tendency to activate and apply long-held, highly automatized facial stereotypes. These findings suggest that face impressions are more flexible than typically appreciated, and they provide a potential inroad toward combating our ingrained biases based on facial appearance.

Convergence-improved congruent matching cells (CMC) method for firing pin impression comparison.

A firing pin impression is usually concave in shape with a small textured area, which makes it difficult to perform automated algorithm-based comparison. The congruent matching cells (CMC) method was invented for accurate breech face impression comparison, in which a reference impression is divided into correlation cells. Each cell is registered to a cell-sized area of the comparison impression that has maximum similarity in surface topography. Four parameters are used to quantify the congruent matching pattern of the registration position and orientation. This paper aims to further develop the cell-division-matching method based on a convergence feature and to develop practical convergence-improved algorithms for firing pin impression comparison. The convergence feature refers to the tendency of the x-y registration positions of correlated cell pairs to converge at the correct registration angle when comparing same-source samples at different orientations. The areal Gaussian filter is employed to extract high-frequency micro-features; the least-squares matching method is used to improve each cross-correlation precision and reach convergence in the registration positions of correlated cell pairs; and a density-based clustering algorithm is introduced to collect the registration positions of dense cell pairs relative to a virtual common center and to remove outliers. Improvements are achieved in the reliability and accuracy of the number of congruent matching cell pairs (CMCs) collected, which represents the quantification of the degree of pairwise impression similarity. Experiments in this report used 40 firing pin impression samples on cartridge cases fired from 10 pistols. The results included no false identifications or false exclusions.

Visual Attention in Real‐World Conversation: Gaze Patterns Are Modulated by Communication and Group Size

Gaze behavior both initiates and maintains conversations, playing a crucial role in real‐world collaboration. Hitherto, most findings on social attention stem from research using pictures of faces in the laboratory, however, attention operates differently in the real world. Thus, we know little of how gaze behavior operates in naturalistic interactions. To bridge this gap, we applied mobile eye‐tracking to investigate the gaze patterns present in naturalistic conversations. Specifically, we examined gaze behavior of participants in a group of two or five, either sitting together in silence, or engaging in a conversation, in which they took turns either listening or speaking to each other. Results show that participants looked more frequently towards others when the group was communicating compared to when remaining silent, and that they looked at others more frequently when listening compared to when speaking. Furthermore, being part of a dyad led to more social attention being afforded during conversation compared to the group situation, regardless of whether subjects were listening or speaking. Meanwhile, when sitting in silence subjects showed less social gazing in a dyad than in a group of five. Our results provide qualitative and quantitative insights into the patterns of visual attention during dynamic naturalistic conversations.

Pain Modulates Responses to Emotional Stimuli

Pain and emotion are common subjective experiences that play vital roles in daily life. Pain has been clinically confirmed to increase depressive mood. However, little is known about how pain modulates cognitive emotional judgment processing. A better understanding of this may help explain the effect of pain on the development of depressive moods. We recruited 30 adult participants to test their responses to pictures of scenes (Experiment 1) and faces (Experiment 2) that represented happy, neutral, and sad emotions, while experiencing painful (induced via topical capsaicin cream) and control (hand cream) treatments. Results showed that participants in the painful condition showed lower accuracy to emotional scene stimuli and longer reaction times to both emotional scene and face stimuli, relative to the control condition. In addition, the difference values of the reaction times between the painful and control conditions were larger for sad scenes than for happy or neutral scenes. These results suggest that pain alters attentional processing of emotional stimuli, especially with regards to sad scene stimuli, which may explain how painful stimuli affect the development of depressive moods.

Using artificially generated pictures in customer-facing systems: an evaluation study with data-driven personas

ABSTRACT We conduct two studies to evaluate the suitability of artificially generated facial pictures for use in a customer-facing system using data-driven personas. STUDY 1 investigates the quality of a sample of 1,000 artificially generated facial pictures. Obtaining 6,812 crowd judgments, we find that 90% of the images are rated medium quality or better. STUDY 2 examines the application of artificially generated facial pictures in data-driven personas using an experimental setting where the high-quality pictures are implemented in persona profiles. Based on 496 participants using 4 persona treatments (2 × 2 research design), findings of Bayesian analysis show that using the artificial pictures in persona profiles did not decrease the scores for Authenticity, Clarity, Empathy, and Willingness to Use of the data-driven personas.

Development of Monitoring System for Facial Shape and Skin Color Using Depth Camera mounted on a Smartphone

Regular observation and recording of the changes in body appearance are essential for the process of the treatment of plastic surgery and dermatology, especially aesthetic surgery. Usually, physicians treat patients with medical interviews, pictures of the patient's faces before and after their treatment, anatomical data that including size, location, and color of the affected skin. However, it is difficult to capture the affected area under the same conditions every time because the captured range varies depending on the imaging angle and distance. There is a need to record three-dimensional shape of face parts such as cheek, nose, eye, and chin. Therefore, in this study, the face shape and the skin color were measured using the infrared depth camera and the RGB camera built in the smartphone three-dimensionally. We measured before and after modulating the shape and color of the face, and then, the change in volume and the change in skin pigment of skin color was calculated and visualized. This method makes it possible to analyze the skin shape and color independently of the viewing angle and the illumination direction. In this study, the depth sensor built in the smartphone showed the potential to monitor changes in facial shape and skin color. In the future, it is expected to contribute to the development of telemedicine, in which the patient measures their face at home and gets medical treatment consultation remotely.

I-SOCIAL-DB: A labeled database of images collected from websites and social media for Iris recognition

People upload daily a huge number of portrait face pictures on websites and social media, which can be processed using biometric systems based on the face characteristics to perform an automatic recognition of the individuals. However, the performance of face recognition approaches can be limited by negative factors as aging, occlusions, rotations, and uncontrolled expressions. Nevertheless, the constantly increasing quality and resolution of the portrait pictures uploaded on websites and social media could permit to overcome these problems and improve the robustness of biometric recognition methods by enabling the analysis of additional traits, like the iris. To point the attention of the research community to the possible use of iris-based recognition techniques for images uploaded on websites and social media, we present a public image dataset called I-SOCIAL-DB (Iris Social Database). This dataset is composed of 3,286 ocular regions, extracted from 1,643 high-resolution face images of 400 individuals, collected from public websites. For each ocular region, a human expert extracted the coordinates of the circles approximating the inner and outer iris boundaries and performed a pixelwise segmentation of the iris contours, occlusions, and reflections. This dataset is the first collection of ocular images from public websites and social media, and one of the biggest collections of manually segmented ocular images in the literature. In this paper, we also present a qualitative analysis of the samples, a set of testing protocols and figures of merit, and benchmark results achieved using publicly available iris segmentation and recognition algorithms. We hope that this initiative can give a new test tool to the biometric research community, aiming to stimulate new studies in this challenging research field.

Self-Disgust Is Associated With Loneliness, Mental Health Difficulties, and Eye-Gaze Avoidance in War Veterans With PTSD.

In the present study, we examined, for the first time, the association between self-disgust, loneliness, and mental health difficulties in war veterans diagnosed with PTSD. For this purpose, we used a mixed methods design, incorporating surveys and a novel eye-tracking paradigm, and compared the findings from the PTSD veteran group (n = 19) to those from a general population group (n = 22). Our results showed that the PTSD veteran group reported almost three times higher scores in self-disgust, and significantly higher scores in loneliness and mental health difficulties (anxiety and depression), compared to the general population. Furthermore, self-disgust mediated the association between loneliness and anxiety symptoms in both groups. The results from the eye-tracking paradigm further showed that veterans with PTSD displayed a self-avoidance gaze pattern, by looking significantly more toward pictures of faces of unknown others and away from their own face—a pattern that was not replicated in the general population group. Higher self-disgust scores were significantly associated with longer total gaze to the pictures of others (vs. the self). Our findings have implications for the role of self-disgust in the mental health of war veterans.

Threatening Facial Expressions Impact Goal-Directed Actions Only if Task-Relevant.

Facial emotional expressions are a salient source of information for nonverbal social interactions. However, their impact on action planning and execution is highly controversial. In this vein, the effect of the two threatening facial expressions, i.e., angry and fearful faces, is still unclear. Frequently, fear and anger are used interchangeably as negative emotions. However, they convey different social signals. Unlike fear, anger indicates a direct threat toward the observer. To provide new evidence on this issue, we exploited a novel design based on two versions of a Go/No-go task. In the emotional version, healthy participants had to perform the same movement for pictures of fearful, angry, or happy faces and withhold it when neutral expressions were presented. The same pictures were shown in the control version, but participants had to move or suppress the movement, according to the actor’s gender. This experimental design allows us to test task relevance’s impact on emotional stimuli without conflating movement planning with target detection and task switching. We found that the emotional content of faces interferes with actions only when task-relevant, i.e., the effect of emotions is context-dependent. We also showed that angry faces qualitatively had the same effect as fearful faces, i.e., both negative emotions decreased response readiness with respect to happy expressions. However, anger has a much greater impact than fear, as it increases both the rates of mistakes and the time of movement execution. We interpreted these results, suggesting that participants have to exploit more cognitive resources to appraise threatening than positive facial expressions, and angry than fearful faces before acting.

Refined Carbohydrate Consumption and Facial Attractiveness.

Since the second half of the 20th century, a massive increase in the consumption of refined carbohydrates has occurred, generating well-described detrimental health effects such as obesity, insulin resistance, type II diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and dental caries. Certain physiological mechanisms involved, particularly through chronic hyperglycaemia and hyperinsulinaemia, suggest that a non-medical trait such as facial attractiveness could also be affected. To explore this possibility, variation in facial attractiveness was evaluated relative to refined carbohydrate consumption. Attractiveness was assessed from facial pictures as judged by raters of the opposite sex. Estimates of refined carbohydrate consumption were based on the glycaemic load of three mealtimes at-higher glycaemic risk (breakfast, afternoon snack and between-meal snack). In the presence of several control variables, facial pictures of women and men with higher between-meal glycaemic loads were preferred by opposite-sex raters. Structural equation modeling suggests that this result is possibly mediated by an increase in apparent age for men and an increase in femininity for women. The different physiological ecologies of the three meals at-higher glycaemic risk are discussed as well as the interpretation of the results in terms of adaptation or maladaptation to the modern and unique dietary environment.

Geometric morphometric analysis of Japanese female facial shape in relation to psychological impression space

Facial appearance has essential consequences in various social interactions. Previous studies have shown that although people can perceive a variety of impressions from a face, these impressions may form from a relatively small number of core dimensions in the psychological impression space (e.g., valence and dominance). However, few studies have thus far examined which facial shape features contribute to perceptions of the core trait impression dimensions for Asian female faces. This study aimed to identify the commonalities between various facial impressions of Japanese female faces and determine the facial shape components associated with such impressions by applying geometric morphometric (GMM) analysis. In Experiment 1 (Modeling study), Japanese female faces were evaluated in terms of 18 trait adjectives that are frequently used to describe facial appearance in daily life. We found that Japanese female facial appearance is indeed evaluated mainly on the valence and dominance dimensions. In Experiment 2 (Validation study), we confirmed that all the trait impressions were quantitatively manipulated by transforming the facial shape features associated with valence and dominance. Our results provide evidence that various facial impressions derived from these two underlying dimensions can be quantitatively manipulated by transforming facial shape using the GMM techniques.