A Naturalistic Database of Thermal Emotional Facial Expressions and Effects of Induced Emotions on Memory
This provides a resource for studying emotional expressions, but the findings are incremental as they show no significant effects on memory or thermal discrimination.
The researchers created a database of thermal and visible facial expressions induced by watching emotional movie clips, collecting over 2000 expressions per mode from 40 subjects, and found that emotions did not affect memory word recognition tasks or discriminate emotional states based on facial temperature changes.
This work defines a procedure for collecting naturally induced emotional facial expressions through the vision of movie excerpts with high emotional contents and reports experimental data ascertaining the effects of emotions on memory word recognition tasks. The induced emotional states include the four basic emotions of sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise, as well as the neutral emotional state. The resulting database contains both thermal and visible emotional facial expressions, portrayed by forty Italian subjects and simultaneously acquired by appropriately synchronizing a thermal and a standard visible camera. Each subject's recording session lasted 45 minutes, allowing for each mode (thermal or visible) to collect a minimum of 2000 facial expressions from which a minimum of 400 were selected as highly expressive of each emotion category. The database is available to the scientific community and can be obtained contacting one of the authors. For this pilot study, it was found that emotions and/or emotion categories do not affect individual performance on memory word recognition tasks and temperature changes in the face or in some regions of it do not discriminate among emotional states.