A Naturalistic Database of Thermal Emotional Facial Expressions and Effects of Induced Emotions on Memory

TL;DR

This study presents a database of thermal and visible facial expressions induced by movie clips, examining their effects on memory, and finds no significant impact of emotions on recognition performance or facial temperature changes.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel database of synchronized thermal and visible emotional facial expressions and investigates their relation to memory performance.

Findings

Emotions did not affect memory word recognition performance.

Facial temperature changes did not discriminate among emotional states.

The database is publicly available for research use.

Abstract

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.