Analysis of an actors’ emotions and audience's impression of facial expression
Authors: Takahashi Naoki , Hamada Yuri , Shoji Hiroko 
Published: June 2022

1. IntroductionNon-verbal information is very important in all communication. According to Mehrabian’s study, the facial has 55%, the vocal has 38% and the verbal has 8% of information people receive. Technologies of computer-mediated communication promoted communication that does not need face-to-face (e.g. e-mail). Recently, however, a video communication system that enables us to have conversations looking at each other’s faces is spreading. Understanding impressions conveyed by facial expressions is getting more important again.Our purpose is to examine whether a facial expression can convey his/her emotion to a person. In the experiment, subjects evaluated their impression of images of facial expression. We compared the evaluation with another evaluation by the actor who create the facial expressions.2. MethodsIn the experiment, we made images of the actor’s face corresponding to some emotional keyword and showed subjects as audiences. The actor is one female volunteer in her 20s. Audiences are fifteen male and fifteen female volunteers in their 20s. Fifteen audiences were acquainted with the actor and the rest of them looked at her for the first time in this experiment.Actors instructed to create facial expressions of eight emotions, “surprising,” “frustrating,” “exciting,” “guarding,” “relaxing,” “angry,” “fear,” and “boring.” Stimulus images were bust shots (photographs of the upper body than her bust) of the actor creating facial expression. After the photography, she was instructed to evaluate her own emotions in the images by two Likert scales of eleven points from unpleasure (0) to pleasure (10) and from deactivated (0) to activated (10). Similarly, audiences evaluated her emotion after looking at images on the same two scales. All questionnaires were formed by Google form and conducted via the online survey.In analysis, we assumed that differences of evaluations of the actor and audiences are indicating gaps of emotions the actor expressed and the audiences felt. we examined the significance of the difference using a two-sided t-test (significance level = 0.05) to investigate the degree of the gap.3. Results and discussionEvaluations by actor’s self (N=1) and by audiences (averages of N=30) are generally similar, but there are significant differences (p<0.05) in frustrating, guarding, relaxing, angry, comfortable, fear, and boring in valence and all emotions in arousal. These results show that the actor’s emotion conveyed to audiences roughly, but the degree of the actor’s emotion was not impressed on audiences accurately.We assumed emotional plane which consists of two axes of valence and arousal using Russel’s circumplex model as a reference and calculated distances of the actor’s emotion point and audiences’ impression point on the plane to compare the difference by sex and acquaintance. Male audiences could evaluate relatively close to the actor’s emotion with female audiences, but a significant difference among sex (p>0.05) was not found in any images. On the other hand, acquainted audiences could evaluate relatively close to the actor’s emotion with unacquainted audiences, and there are significant differences among acquaintance in frustration (p=0.029), angry (p=0.029), and comfortable (p=0.040).