Facial Expression Intensity Research Articles

Food perception and emotion measured over time in-lab and in-home

BackgroundReal-life human eating behaviour does not take place in a vacuum, rather it happens in context. The context in which consumers eat their foods influences the acceptance of the consumed foods. Consequently, consumers’ hedonic and sensory ratings elicited in a natural consumption context will differ from those elicited under controlled sensory laboratory conditions. Moreover, foods are rarely consumed on one single occasion but are typically consumed repeatedly and ratings may change over repeated consumptions as well.Often, consumer acceptance is tested explicitly, for example with liking ratings, especially when the testing is done outside the laboratory. Implicit tests such as facial expressions and physiological measurements of the autonomic nervous system can provide additional information on consumer acceptance. As a result of technological advantages, such tests are no longer limited to the laboratory but can also be used in natural consumption contexts. MethodEighteen healthy Dutch consumers (18–65 years of age) tested four test foods plus a warm-up sample ten times on consecutive weekdays and on similar hours using their own laptop and webcam. Test locations alternated between the sensory laboratory and the participant’s own home. Explicit measures included liking scores and scores on ten sensory taste/flavour/texture attributes, and implicit measures included facial expressions, heart rate and consumption duration using Face ReaderTM. This study was the first to validate the Face ReaderTM for usage at home. ResultsThe liking scores and sensory profiles varied between test foods (p < 0.05), but not between test locations and only some specific sensory attributes showed systematic variation over repeated consumption. In contrast, implicit measures showed systematic effects of test foods, test locations, and repeated consumptions (p < 0.05). Compared to consumption in the laboratory, consumption at home was faster, triggered higher heart rates, and triggered more intense facial expressions of happiness, contempt, disgust and boredom. ConclusionsImplicit tests were more sensitive to effects of test location and repeated consumption than explicit tests. Additional research is required to investigate the relevance of these measures to long term consumer acceptance of food products.

Subjective ratings and emotional recognition of children's facial expressions from the CAFE set.

Access to validated stimuli depicting children’s facial expressions is useful for different research domains (e.g., developmental, cognitive or social psychology). Yet, such databases are scarce in comparison to others portraying adult models, and validation procedures are typically restricted to emotional recognition accuracy. This work presents subjective ratings for a sub-set of 283 photographs selected from the Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE [1]). Extending beyond the original emotion recognition accuracy norms [2], our main goal was to validate this database across eight subjective dimensions related to the model (e.g., attractiveness, familiarity) or the specific facial expression (e.g., intensity, genuineness), using a sample from a different nationality (N = 450 Portuguese participants). We also assessed emotion recognition (forced-choice task with seven options: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral). Overall results show that most photographs were rated as highly clear, genuine and intense facial expressions. The models were rated as both moderately familiar and likely to belong to the in-group, obtaining high attractiveness and arousal ratings. Results also showed that, similarly to the original study, the facial expressions were accurately recognized. Normative and raw data are available as supplementary material at https://osf.io/mjqfx/.

The Role of Pattern Extrapolation in the Perception of Dynamic Facial Expressions in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Changes in the intensity and type of facial expressions reflect alterations in the emotional state of the agent. Such “direct” access to the other’s affective state might, top-down, influence the perception of the facial expressions that gave rise to the affective state inference. Previously, we described a perceptual bias occurring when the last, neutral, expression of offsets of facial expressions (joy-to-neutral and anger-to-neutral), was evaluated. Individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and matched typically developed (TD) individuals rated the neutral expression at the end of the joy-offset videos as slightly angry and the identical neutral expression at the end of the anger-offset videos as slightly happy (“overshoot” bias). That study suggested that the perceptual overshoot response bias in the TD group could be best explained by top-down “emotional anticipation,” i.e., the involuntary/automatic anticipation of the agent’s next emotional state of mind, generated by the immediately preceding perceptual history (low-level mind reading). The experimental manipulations further indicated that in the HFA group the “overshoot” was better explained by contrast effects between the first and last facial expressions, both presented for a relatively long period of 400 ms. However, in principle, there is another, more parsimonious, explanation, which is pattern extrapolation or representational momentum (RM): the extrapolation of a pattern present in the dynamic sequence. This hypothesis is tested in the current study, in which 18 individuals with HFA and a matched control group took part. In a base-line condition, joy-offset and anger-offset video-clips were presented. In the new experimental condition, the clips were modified so as to create an offset-onset-offset pattern within each sequence (joy-to-anger-to-neutral and anger-to-joy-to-neutral). The final neutral expressions had to be evaluated. The overshoot bias was confirmed in the base-line condition for both TD and HFA groups, while the experimental manipulation removed the bias in both groups. This outcome ruled out pattern extrapolation or RM as explanation for the perceptual “overshoot” bias in the HFA group and suggested a role for facial contrast effects in HFA. This is compatible with the view that ASD individuals tend to lack the spontaneous “tracking” of changes in the others’ affective state and hence show no or reduced emotional anticipation.

The perception of emotional facial expressions by children with autism using hybrid multiple factorial design and eye-tracking

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have the deficits in emotional facial expression recognition and understanding, which is considered as the core source of their social communication disorder and stereotype behaviour. Previous studies have suggested that individuals with ASD have the deficits in the perception of static emotional facial expressions, but results are inconclusive. The use of 3D or dynamic facial stimuli that express emotions at different levels of intensities may produce more robust results, since these resemble the expression of emotions in daily life to a greater extent. In this study, 30 children (aged 2–7 years) with ASD and 51 age-matched children with typical development (TD) performed an emotion recognition (ER) task, in which morphs, presented on a computer screen, depicted facial expressions associated with two basic emotions (happiness and fear) at four levels of emotional intensity(25%–100%). Using a hybrid-design experiment and eye-tracking technology, we explored the influencing factors of ER in children with ASD and their interaction. In addition, we analyzed the gaze characteristics and processing patterns of children with ASD during the ER, and their impact on ER. The results showed that the type of subject, expression category, and intensity of expression had the main effect on recognition accuracy, and there was interaction among the factors that affected the emotional face recognition ability of the children with ASD. Moreover, children with ASD and TD both had an advantage when recognizing dynamic expressions rather than static expressions in 2D or 3D. The recognition accuracy of 3D expressions of children with TD was higher than that of 2D expressions, but children with ASD had the opposite result. The recognition accuracy of fearful expression for both ASD and TD groups was significantly better than that of happy expression. There was an interaction effect between gender and expression category, but age was not significant. In particular, girls’ facial expression recognition ability was superior to that of boys. The eye-tracking results showed that children with ASD have face-specific processing mechanisms: avoidance of eye contact, increased focus on the mouth and background information, and a preference for local feature processing. In conclusion, this study suggests that the material, category, and intensity of facial expression combines with the age and gender of subjects to affect the emotional expression recognition ability of children with ASD. Children with autism have the advantage of dynamic processing and mouth-directed gaze. In addition, dynamic facial expressions may be used as effective training and intervention materials for ER. Abnormal face processing and eye-tracking characteristics can help to understand the social disorders of ASD and provide behavioral characteristic indicators for early identification of ASD.

Unsupervised Estimation of Facial Expression Intensity for Emotional Scene Retrieval in Lifelog Videos

This article describes how in order to facilitate the retrieval of impressive scenes from lifelog videos, a method to estimate the intensity of a facial expression of a person in a lifelog video is proposed. The previous work made it possible to estimate the facial expression intensity, but the previous method requires some training samples which should be manually and carefully selected. This makes the previous method quite inconvenient. This article attempts to solve this problem by introducing an unsupervised learning method. The proposed method estimates the facial expression intensity via a clustering on the basis of several facial features computed from the positional relationship of a number of facial feature points. For the evaluation of the proposed method, an experiment to estimate the facial expression intensity is performed using a lifelog video data set. The estimation performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the previous method.

Quantifying facial expression signal and intensity use during development

Behavioral studies investigating facial expression recognition during development have applied various methods to establish by which age emotional expressions can be recognized. Most commonly, these methods employ static images of expressions at their highest intensity (apex) or morphed expressions of different intensities, but they have not previously been compared. Our aim was to (a) quantify the intensity and signal use for recognition of six emotional expressions from early childhood to adulthood and (b) compare both measures and assess their functional relationship to better understand the use of different measures across development. Using a psychophysical approach, we isolated the quantity of signal necessary to recognize an emotional expression at full intensity and the quantity of expression intensity (using neutral expression image morphs of varying intensities) necessary for each observer to recognize the six basic emotions while maintaining performance at 75%. Both measures revealed that fear and happiness were the most difficult and easiest expressions to recognize across age groups, respectively, a pattern already stable during early childhood. The quantity of signal and intensity needed to recognize sad, angry, disgust, and surprise expressions decreased with age. Using a Bayesian update procedure, we then reconstructed the response profiles for both measures. This analysis revealed that intensity and signal processing are similar only during adulthood and, therefore, cannot be straightforwardly compared during development. Altogether, our findings offer novel methodological and theoretical insights and tools for the investigation of the developing affective system.

F144. MUSCARINIC M1 RECEPTOR SIGNALLING UNDERLYING COGNITION IN PSYCHOTIC DISORDERS

BackgroundAntipsychotic treatment has failed to improve cognitive deficits associated with psychotic disorders. This has led to an increased interest to revisit earlier implications from post-mortem studies that lowered muscarinic M1 receptor signaling may underlie these symptoms. This receptor is highly expressed in important regions for cognition such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and hippocampus, and administration of anti-muscarinic agents gives induce cognitive deficits in healthy volunteers. Administration of xanomeline, a M1/4 agonist in patients with schizophrenia resulted in improved learning and memory scores and decreased psychotic symptom severity. Therefore, the current study sought to examine alterations in muscarinic M1 receptor signaling in relation to cognitive functioning in medication free subjects with psychotic disorders and matched controls.MethodsMuscarinic M1 binding potential (BPND) was measured using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) with the M1 selective radiopharmaceutical 123I-iododexetimide in the DLPFC and hippocampus in the psychotic group. Pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging (phMRI) with the M1 antagonist biperiden was used to assess differences in functional response on the paired associate learning task (PAL) and emotion recognition task (ERT) adapted for fMRI from The Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery in all subjects. The PAL task assessed encoding phase (learning) and retrieval (memory) of figure-place associations and the ERT task social cognition, both highly predictive of functional outcome. Cluster significance was set at Z>2.3, with cluster threshold correction at p<0.05.ResultsThe current study included 26 (mean age: 27.68; 19male/7 female) subjects with a psychotic disorder and 29 (mean age 25.63; 20 male/9 female) matched controls. Subjects with psychotic disorders recalled less figure place associations than controls (t=2.9, p=0.005) and were worse in recognizing different intensities of disgust emotions (t=2.26, p=0.03). Psychotic subjects showed a blunted response in functional reactivity to biperiden in the bilateral superior and medial frontal gyri with decreasing intensity of disgust facial expressions compared to controls, this blunted response was greatest in those with lower M1 BPND in the DLPFC. During encoding processes, psychotic subjects also showed differential reactivity to biperiden in the left middle frontal gyrus, insula, and caudate nucleus showing hypoactivation compared to controls. Greater hypoactivation was significantly associated with lower hippocampal M1 BPND. For retrieval both groups showed lowered activation under biperiden in the inferior frontal gyrus, but psychotic subjects failed to show increased activation with increasing cognitive load in the placebo condition, like the controls. Lower hippocampal M1 BPND in psychotic subjects was associated with lower activation of this region.DiscussionResults show preliminary evidence for altered M1 signaling of prefrontal areas in psychotic disorders underlying social cognition and learning and memory processes. Additionally, results show an important role for the M1 receptor in the DLPFC and hippocampus in altered fronto-striatal activation underlying encoding processes. Lower hippocampal M1 BPND is related to more severe alterations in underlying functional activation in encoding and retrieval processes. Results further support the need for development of therapeutic strategies that focus on the M1 receptor to improve cognitive functioning and functional outcome in psychosis.

Computer-analyzed facial expression as a surrogate marker for autism spectrum social core symptoms.

To develop novel interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) core symptoms, valid, reliable, and sensitive longitudinal outcome measures are required for detecting symptom change over time. Here, we tested whether a computerized analysis of quantitative facial expression measures could act as a marker for core ASD social symptoms. Facial expression intensity values during a semi-structured socially interactive situation extracted from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) were quantified by dedicated software in 18 high-functioning adult males with ASD. Controls were 17 age-, gender-, parental socioeconomic background-, and intellectual level-matched typically developing (TD) individuals. Statistical analyses determined whether values representing the strength and variability of each facial expression element differed significantly between the ASD and TD groups and whether they correlated with ADOS reciprocal social interaction scores. Compared with the TD controls, facial expressions in the ASD group appeared more “Neutral” (d = 1.02, P = 0.005, PFDR < 0.05) with less variation in Neutral expression (d = 1.08, P = 0.003, PFDR < 0.05). Their expressions were also less “Happy” (d = −0.78, P = 0.038, PFDR > 0.05) with lower variability in Happy expression (d = 1.10, P = 0.003, PFDR < 0.05). Moreover, the stronger Neutral facial expressions in the ASD participants were positively correlated with poorer ADOS reciprocal social interaction scores (ρ = 0.48, P = 0.042). These findings indicate that our method for quantitatively measuring reduced facial expressivity during social interactions can be a promising marker for core ASD social symptoms.

The Relation Between Functional Anatomy of the Face and Threat Perception Evoked by Facial Expression of Anger in Schizophrenia.

It is well known that patients with schizophrenia are more sensitive to negative rather than positive feelings. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the degree of explicitly perceived threat against facial expressions of anger. We were also interested in the association between perceived threat, and both the objective intensity of facial expression of anger and the functional anatomy of the perceived faces. Forty-eight patients with schizophrenia and 51 healthy controls were enrolled. Participants were presented a total of 21 sequences of anger including six different face images, which were selected from The Cohn-Kanade AU-Coded Facial Expression Database with emotions gradually changing from neutral to peak expression of anger. We measured when [time to threat (TtT)] and to which degree [Total perception of threat (TPoT)] threat was perceived by participants. The relation between perceived threat with the involvement of functional anatomic units among the face stimuli was also investigated. TPoT was higher in the index compared to the control group. TtT was comparable in two groups and was associated with the severity of hallucinations among the index group. Total emotion intensity was lower in the sequences that evoked more threat in the index group. Functional contribution of the eyes and the upper lip to expression of anger were associated with TPoT among the index group. Schizophrenia subjects may be prone to perceive more threat in response to facial expression of anger. This proneness may be evident in response to less intense expression of anger, particularly via eyes and the upper lip.

Do We Expect Women to Look Happier Than They Are? A Test of Gender-Dependent Perceptual Correction.

Feminine facial features enhance the expressive cues associated with happiness but not sadness. This makes a woman look happier than a man even when their smiles have the same intensity. So, to correctly infer the actual happiness of a woman, one would have to subtract the effect of these facial features. We hypothesised that our perceptual system would apply this subtraction for women, but not for men. This implies that this female-specific subtraction would cause one to infer a man to be happier than a woman if both are matched for facial appearance and expression intensity. We tested this using androgynous virtual faces with equal expression intensity. As predicted, happy men were inferred to be happier than happy women, but sad men were not inferred to be sadder than sad women, supporting our hypothesis of a gender- and emotion-specific perceptual correction.

The Influence of Social Threat on Pain, Aggression, and Empathy in Women

Only one published study has investigated the effect of a threatening social context on the perception and expression of pain, showing that social threat leads to increased pain reports but reduced nonverbal pain expression. The current study aimed to replicate and extend these findings to further explore the effects of a threatening social context. Healthy, female participants (N = 71) received 10 electrocutaneous stimuli delivered by a confederate. They were led to believe that the confederate was requested to administer 10 painful stimuli (control group) or that the confederate deliberately chose to deliver 10 painful stimuli when given the choice to deliver between 1 to 10 painful stimuli (social threat group). Self-reported pain intensity, unpleasantness, threat value of pain, and painful facial expression were assessed. Additionally, empathy and aggression toward the confederate were investigated. Social threat did not affect painful facial expression or self-reported pain intensity, but led to increased aggression toward the confederate. Moreover, perceived social threat predicted the threat value of pain and reduced empathy toward the confederate. We were not able to replicate the previously reported dissociation between pain reports and pain expression as a result of social threat. However, social threat was associated with an increased threat value of pain, increased aggression, and reduced empathy. PerspectiveA threatening social context affects how threatening pain is perceived and has interpersonal consequences such as increased aggression and reduced empathy, thereby creating a double burden on the individual suffering from pain.

Effects of task-irrelevant emotional information on deception

ABSTRACTDeception has been reported to be influenced by task-relevant emotional information from an external stimulus. However, it remains unclear how task-irrelevant emotional information would influence deception. In the present study, facial expressions of different valence and emotion intensity were presented to participants, where they were asked to make either truthful or deceptive gender judgments according to the preceding cues. We observed the influence of facial expression intensity upon individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving (mean difference of individuals’ truthful and deceptive response times). Larger cost was observed for high intensity faces compared to low intensity faces. These results provided insights on how automatic attraction of attention evoked by task-irrelevant emotional information in facial expressions influenced individuals’ cognitive cost of deceiving.

Sensitivity to facial expressions among extremely low birth weight survivors in their 30s.

The current study investigated the impact of birth weight on the ability to recognize facial expressions in adulthood among the longest known prospectively followed cohort of extremely low birth weight survivors (ELBW; <1,000 g). We measured perceptual threshold to detect subtle facial expressions and confusion among different emotion categories in order to disentangle visual perceptual ability from emotional processing. ELBW adults (N = 64, Mage = 31.9 years) were more likely than normal birth weight (NBW) controls (N = 82, Mage = 32.5 years) to see fear in angry faces. This finding was not a result of increased perceptual efficiency in processing fearful expressions in the ELBW adults, since the two groups did not differ on their threshold to detect emotion in low intensity facial expressions. These findings suggest that a processing bias toward fear may reflect long-term developmental effects from being born at ELBW that may portend socioemotional problems that characterize ELBW survivors.

Identification and Perceived Intensity of Facial Expressions of Emotion in Bipolar Disorder and Major Depression.

This study aimed to examine the accuracy in identifying facial expressions and the perceived intensity of emotions of happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear, surprise in bipolar disorder (BD), and major depressive disorder (MDD). Ninety-three adult participants (n = 30 BD, 80% female; n = 18 MDD, 72.2% female; n = 45 C, 46.7% female) completed a facial expression task. Stimuli in the task were first presented for 200 ms, followed by 500 ms, and 1000 ms. Participants were asked to identify the emotion expressed by each face and judge its intensity on a Likert scale. Accuracy and perceived intensity of expressions corresponding to each emotion were compared between groups using a repeated measures ANCOVA, with length of stimulus presentation as a within-subjects variable. Expressions of sadness were rated more intensely by patients with BD, and expressions of anger by those with MDD, than control participants. Subjects with BD were less accurate than control participants in identifying expressions of disgust. An interaction effect was also identified for the detection of sadness, whereby patients with BD were significantly less accurate when expressions were shown for 200 ms. The increased intensity with which emotions were perceived by patients with BD and MDD has important repercussions for patient functioning and clinical practice. A tendency to overestimate the intensity of certain facial expressions in mood disorders may lead patients to interpret social cues erroneously and engage in dysfunctional behaviors and cognitive patterns. Future studies should focus on this variable in addition to the accuracy of emotion identification.

"Similar representations of emotions across faces and voices": Correction to Kuhn et al. (2017).

Reports an error in "Similar Representations of Emotions Across Faces and Voices" by Lisa Katharina Kuhn, Taeko Wydell, Nadine Lavan, Carolyn McGettigan and Lúcia Garrido (Emotion, Advanced Online Publication, Mar 02, 2017, np). In the article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed and the Creative Commons CC-BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2017 The Author(s)" and the omitted disclaimer is below. All versions of this article have been corrected. "This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher." (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2017-09406-001.) Emotions are a vital component of social communication, carried across a range of modalities and via different perceptual signals such as specific muscle contractions in the face and in the upper respiratory system. Previous studies have found that emotion recognition impairments after brain damage depend on the modality of presentation: recognition from faces may be impaired whereas recognition from voices remains preserved, and vice versa. On the other hand, there is also evidence for shared neural activation during emotion processing in both modalities. In a behavioral study, we investigated whether there are shared representations in the recognition of emotions from faces and voices. We used a within-subjects design in which participants rated the intensity of facial expressions and nonverbal vocalizations for each of the 6 basic emotion labels. For each participant and each modality, we then computed a representation matrix with the intensity ratings of each emotion. These matrices allowed us to examine the patterns of confusions between emotions and to characterize the representations of emotions within each modality. We then compared the representations across modalities by computing the correlations of the representation matrices across faces and voices. We found highly correlated matrices across modalities, which suggest similar representations of emotions across faces and voices. We also showed that these results could not be explained by commonalities between low-level visual and acoustic properties of the stimuli. We thus propose that there are similar or shared coding mechanisms for emotions which may act independently of modality, despite their distinct perceptual inputs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Similar representations of emotions across faces and voices.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 17(6) of Emotion (see record 2017-18585-001). In the article, the copyright attribution was incorrectly listed and the Creative Commons CC-BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2017 The Author(s)" and the omitted disclaimer is below. All versions of this article have been corrected. "This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher."] Emotions are a vital component of social communication, carried across a range of modalities and via different perceptual signals such as specific muscle contractions in the face and in the upper respiratory system. Previous studies have found that emotion recognition impairments after brain damage depend on the modality of presentation: recognition from faces may be impaired whereas recognition from voices remains preserved, and vice versa. On the other hand, there is also evidence for shared neural activation during emotion processing in both modalities. In a behavioral study, we investigated whether there are shared representations in the recognition of emotions from faces and voices. We used a within-subjects design in which participants rated the intensity of facial expressions and nonverbal vocalizations for each of the 6 basic emotion labels. For each participant and each modality, we then computed a representation matrix with the intensity ratings of each emotion. These matrices allowed us to examine the patterns of confusions between emotions and to characterize the representations of emotions within each modality. We then compared the representations across modalities by computing the correlations of the representation matrices across faces and voices. We found highly correlated matrices across modalities, which suggest similar representations of emotions across faces and voices. We also showed that these results could not be explained by commonalities between low-level visual and acoustic properties of the stimuli. We thus propose that there are similar or shared coding mechanisms for emotions which may act independently of modality, despite their distinct perceptual inputs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

8-5 主観的尺度に合致した顔表情の強度推定と認識(第8部門コンピュータビジョン,ヒューマンインタフェース,その他)

8-5 主観的尺度に合致した顔表情の強度推定と認識(第8部門コンピュータビジョン,ヒューマンインタフェース,その他)

Internal noise estimates correlate with autistic traits.

Previous neuroimaging research has reported increased internal (neural) noise in sensory systems of autistic individuals. However, it is unclear if this difference has behavioural or perceptual consequences, as previous attempts at measuring internal noise in ASD psychophysically have been indirect. Here, we use a "gold standard" psychophysical double-pass paradigm to investigate the relationship between internal noise and autistic traits in the neurotypical population (n = 43). We measured internal noise in three tasks (contrast perception, facial expression intensity perception, and number summation) to estimate a global internal noise factor using principal components analysis. This global internal noise was positively correlated with autistic traits (rs = 0.32, P = 0.035). This suggests that increased internal noise is associated with the ASD phenotype even in subclinical populations. The finding is discussed in relation to the neural and genetic basis of internal noise in ASD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1384-1391. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Joint facial expression recognition and intensity estimation based on weighted votes of image sequences

Facial behavior consists of dynamically changing properties of facial features as a result of muscle activation. Facial behavior analysis is a challenging problem due to complexity of emotions and variability of the facial expressions associated with the emotions. Most facial expression recognition systems attempt to recognize facial expressions without taking into account the intensity of the expressions. In this paper, a novel framework for facial expression recognition and intensity estimation with low computational complexity requirement is proposed. The algorithm constructs a representation of facial features based on a weighted voting scheme and employs Hidden Markov Models to classify an input video into one of the six basic expressions, namely anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The temporal segments, neutral, onset, and apex, of an expression are then obtained by means of a change-point detector. Evaluations on subject-independent analysis was conducted using Cohn-Kanade dataset and Beihang University facial expression datasets. The proposed approach has demonstrated a superior performance in recognizing facial expressions and estimating expression intensities.

Asians' Facial Responsiveness to Basic Tastes by Automated Facial Expression Analysis System.

Growing evidence shows that consumer choices in real life are mostly driven by unconscious mechanisms rather than conscious. The unconscious process could be measured by behavioral measurements. This study aims to apply automatic facial expression analysis technique for consumers' emotion representation, and explore the relationships between sensory perception and facial responses. Basic taste solutions (sourness, sweetness, bitterness, umami, and saltiness) with 6 levels plus water were used, which could cover most of the tastes found in food and drink. The other contribution of this study is to analyze the characteristics of facial expressions and correlation between facial expressions and perceptive hedonic liking for Asian consumers. Up until now, the facial expression application researches only reported for western consumers, while few related researches investigated the facial responses during food consuming for Asian consumers. Experimental results indicated that facial expressions could identify different stimuli with various concentrations and different hedonic levels. The perceived liking increased at lower concentrations and decreased at higher concentrations, while samples with medium concentrations were perceived as the most pleasant except sweetness and bitterness. High correlations were founded between perceived intensities of bitterness, umami, saltiness, and facial reactions of disgust and fear. Facial expression disgust and anger could characterize emotion "dislike," and happiness could characterize emotion "like," while neutral could represent "neither like nor dislike." The identified facial expressions agree with the perceived sensory emotions elicited by basic taste solutions. The correlation analysis between hedonic levels and facial expression intensities obtained in this study are in accordance with that discussed for western consumers.