Professional actors demonstrate variability, not stereotypical expressions, when portraying emotional states in photographs.

ABSTRACT: It is long hypothesized that there is a reliable, specific mapping between certain emotional states and the facial movements that express those states. This hypothesis is often tested by asking untrained participants to pose the facial movements they believe they use to express emotions during generic scenarios. Here, we test this hypothesis using, as stimuli, photographs of facial configurations posed by professional actors in response to contextually-rich scenarios. The scenarios portrayed in the photographs were rated by a convenience sample of participants for the extent to which they evoked an instance of 13 emotion categories, and actors' facial poses were coded for their specific movements. Both unsupervised and supervised machine learning find that in these photographs, the actors

SUBMITTER: Le Mau T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8376986 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature