Face Puzzle: dynamic facial emotion recognition stimuli English validation
Creators: name: Roze, Krista
name: Kliemann, Dorit
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Biological Psychology
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology

description: Identifying a person’s emotions through their facial expressions is necessary in helping us navigate social interactions. Some individuals, such as those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), have difficulties in accurately identifying emotions from faces. These difficulties affect everyday interactions and contribute to the diagnostic phenotype. Facial emotion recognition (FER) tasks have been developed in an attempt to measure facial expression recognition abilities in both neurotypical and psychiatric populations in order to assess and quantify potential impairments. These tasks are also useful in retesting participants undergoing social skills or other training in order to track any improvements. FER tests to date often suffer from two limitations. First, stimulus sets used in established FER tasks are often limited to basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise; plus neutral expressions as baseline), and add no or only few complex emotions (e.g., jealousy and boredom (Montagne, Kessels, De Haan, &amp; Perrett, 2007)). Using only basic emotions to quantify FER abilities could potentially result in reduced external validity of the tasks by not accounting for the wide array of more complex emotions encountered in everyday life. Second, FER tasks often use static images of emotional faces, which do not capture naturalistic and dynamic aspects facial emotion recognition. Previously, the Face Puzzle tasks addressed these limitations by utilizing dynamic video stimuli featuring 15 actors portraying a wider variety of emotions to more closely approximate real life facial emotion recognition. (Kliemann et al., 2013). This stimulus set consisted of 25 videos of emotional facial expressions, with 5 basic (angry, happy, disgusted, fearful, surprised) and 20 complex emotions (interested, amused, aggrieved, troubled, jealous, enthusiastic, apologetic, disappointed, relieved, expectant, bored, compassionate, contemptuous, pardoning, embarrassed, wistful, furious, content, confident, doubtful), for a total of 11 positive and 14 negative emotions. In an initial validation study the Face Puzzle tasks showed good internal consistency, consistent external validity and sensitivity to impaired FER in adult individuals with ASD. Originally, the stimuli and task were designed in German, leaving it an open question whether intended emotion expressions and respective labels are valid in the English language, and thus whether the task is valid for use in English as well. The overall aim of this project is thus to validate the stimulus set and task design for the English language. We will only focus on the explicit Face Puzzle task, since the implicit version does not involve written labels. A selection of videos for these stimuli differ from the original stimulus set in order to increase the diversity of the actors in the stimuli. Five of the emotions (happy, doubtful, content, surprised, and enthusiastic) are represented in three different videos by different actors than in the original set, in order to choose the optimal presentation of each emotion.