Development and Its Preliminary Standardization of Pictures of Facial Expressions for Affective Neurosciences

Lee, Won Hee; Chae, Jeong Ho; Bahk, Won Myong; Lee, Kyoung Uk

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
In recent years there has been a discernible increase of interest in facial expressions as a tool for affective neurosciences research which investigates the neural circuit for emotional perception and control. Though substantial researches have documented the universality of several emotional expressions, researches have shown evidences for cross-cultural differences of facial emotion recognition. Therefore the need for facial expressions of Koreans is gathering strength. Thus we developed the images of facial expressions of Korean people as a research tool for affective neurosciences and standardized them.
METHODS
Three professional actors and three actresses were participated in this study (two in their twenties, two in their forties, two in their sixties). They were asked to pose each of the following facial expressions in turn: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise. And facial emotion identification test was done for one hundred common person to get percent of judgment of each emotion and intensity ratings for each photographs.
RESULTS
Six facial expressions in each subject were obtained. Among six emotions, subjects performed better on the recognition of happiness and worse on the recognition of fear and disgust. Also, each emotion term was presented with a 9-point (0-8) scale on which subjects rated. All emotion terms displayed 4.7-7.0 point scale.
CONCLUSION
We could obtain facial expressions of Koreans for happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise and neutral, and then standardized them. As a tool for affective neurosciences, it can be used for the investigation of neural circuit for emotion recognition and control.