Is Micro-expression Ethnic Leaning?

TL;DR

This study investigates the influence of ethnicity on micro-expression analysis, challenging the universality hypothesis by constructing a cross-cultural dataset and developing an ethnically aware recognition framework.

Contribution

It introduces a cross-cultural micro-expression database with ethnic annotations and proposes an ethnically aware recognition framework that considers ethnic differences.

Findings

Ethnic bias influences micro-expression recognition.

An ethnically aware framework improves recognition accuracy.

Qualitative analysis supports ethnicity's role in expression analysis.

Abstract

How much does ethnicity play its part in emotional expression? Emotional expression and micro-expression research probe into understanding human psychological responses to emotional stimuli, thereby revealing substantial hidden yet authentic emotions that can be useful in the event of diagnosis and interviews. While increased attention had been provided to micro-expression analysis, the studies were done under Ekman's assumption of emotion universality, where emotional expressions are identical across cultures and social contexts. Our computational study uncovers some of the influences of ethnic background in expression analysis, leading to an argument that the emotional universality hypothesis is an overgeneralization from the perspective of manual psychological analysis. In this research, we propose to investigate the level of influence of ethnicity in a simulated micro-expression scenario. We construct a cross-cultural micro-expression database and algorithmically annotate the ethnic labels to facilitate the investigation. With the ethnically annotated dataset, we perform a prima facie study to compare mono-ethnicity and stereo-ethnicity in a controlled environment, which uncovers a certain influence of ethnic bias via an experimental way. Building on this finding, we propose a framework that integrates ethnic context into the emotional feature learning process, yielding an ethnically aware framework that recognises ethnicity differences in micro-expression recognition. For improved understanding, qualitative analyses have been done to solidify the preliminary investigation into this new realm of research. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/IcedDoggie/ICMEW2025_EthnicMER