Objective:
To compare facial expressiveness (FE) of infants with and without craniofacial microsomia (cases and controls, respectively) and to compare phenotypic variation among cases in relation to ...FE.
Design:
Positive and negative affect was elicited in response to standardized emotion inductions, video recorded, and manually coded from video using the Facial Action Coding System for Infants and Young Children.
Setting:
Five craniofacial centers: Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Seattle Children’s Hospital, University of Illinois–Chicago, and University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
Participants:
Eighty ethnically diverse 12- to 14-month-old infants.
Main Outcome Measures:
FE was measured on a frame-by-frame basis as the sum of 9 observed facial action units (AUs) representative of positive and negative affect.
Results:
FE differed between conditions intended to elicit positive and negative affect (95% confidence interval = 0.09-0.66, P = .01). FE failed to differ between cases and controls (ES = –0.16 to –0.02, P = .47 to .92). Among cases, those with and without mandibular hypoplasia showed similar levels of FE (ES = –0.38 to 0.54, P = .10 to .66).
Conclusions:
FE varied between positive and negative affect, and cases and controls responded similarly. Null findings for case/control differences may be attributable to a lower than anticipated prevalence of nerve palsy among cases, the selection of AUs, or the use of manual coding. In future research, we will reexamine group differences using an automated, computer vision approach that can cover a broader range of facial movements and their dynamics.
Face-to-face interactions are central to many individual choices and decision-making issues, such as customer services, sales, promotions, and negotiations. While the face effect, that is, ...face-to-face interactions are more effective in inducing compliance than other forms of interactions, has been noted in the literature, its mechanism has rarely been explored. This research helps to fill the theoretical void and provides new insights into the face effect with two lab experiments and one field experiment. Study 1, a field experiment conducted in a beauty salon, and Study 2, a lab experiment, show that the face effect is largely attributable to anticipated facial feedback and that the face effect is stronger when individuals are sensitive to face and when the requester's face is expressive. Study 3, using video-simulated face-to-face interactions, demonstrates that anticipated facial feedback, not necessarily actual feedback, is enough to drive the face effect. In so doing, this research furthers our understanding of factors that affect individual compliance in face-to-face interactions in both the "sending" and "receiving" stages. We discuss the theoretical and empirical implications, limitations, and future avenues of research.
Background. Empathic interactions with animated game characters can help improve user experience, increase immersion, and achieve better affective outcomes related to the use of the game.
Method. We ...used a 2x2 between-participant design and a control condition to analyze the impact of the visual appearance of a virtual game character on empathy and immersion. The four experimental conditions of the game character appearance were: Natural (virtual animal) with expressiveness (emotional facial expressions), natural (virtual animal) with non-expressiveness (without emotional facial expressions), artificial (virtual robotic animal) with expressiveness (emotional facial expressions), and artificial (virtual robotic animal) with non-expressiveness (without emotional facial expressions). The control condition contained a baseline amorphous game character. 100 participants between 18 to 29 years old (M=22.47) were randomly assigned to one of five experimental groups. Participants originated from several countries: Aruba (1), China (1), Colombia (3), Finland (1), France (1), Germany (1), Greece (2), Iceland (1), India (1), Iran (1), Ireland (1), Italy (3), Jamaica (1), Latvia (1), Morocco (3), Netherlands (70), Poland (1), Romania (2), Spain (1), Thailand (1), Turkey (1), United States (1), and Vietnam (1).
Results. We found that congruence in appearance and facial expressions of virtual animals (artificial + non-expressive and natural + expressive) leads to higher levels of self-reported situational empathy and immersion of players in a simulated environment compared to incongruent appearance and facial expressions.
Conclusions. The results of this investigation showed an interaction effect between artificial/natural body appearance and facial expressiveness of a virtual character’s appearance. The evidence from this study suggests that the appearance of the virtual animal has an important influence on user experience.
Display omitted
In this paper we address two issues concerning real-world time-continuous emotion detection from videos of users’ faces: (i) the impact of weak ground truth on the emotion detection ...accuracy and (ii) the impact of the users’ facial expressiveness on the emotion detection accuracy. We implemented an appearance-based emotion detection algorithm that uses Gabor features and a k nearest neighbors classifier. We tested the performance of this algorithm on two datasets with different ground truth strengths (a firm ground truth dataset and a weak ground truth dataset). Then we split the dataset into three subsets reflecting different levels of users’ facial expressiveness (low, mid and high) and performed separate emotion detection.
Parkinson's disease affects facial, vocal and trunk muscles. As symptoms progress, facial expression becomes masked, limiting the person's ability to communicate emotions and intentions to others. As ...people with the disease live and reside in their homes longer, the burden of caregiving is unmitigated by social and emotional rewards provided by an expressive individual. Little is known about how adults living with Parkinson's disease manage their social lives and how an inability to be emotionally expressive can affect social connections and health. Because social networks have been shown to be crucial to the overall well-being of people living with chronic diseases, research is needed on how expressive capacity affects life trajectories and health.
The overall objective is to understand the emergence and evolution of the trajectories of the self-management of the social lives of people living with Parkinson's disease. The central hypothesis is that expressive capacity predicts systematic change in the pattern of social self-management and quality of life outcomes. The specific aims of this 3-year longitudinal study of 120 people with the disease and a maximum of 120 care partners are: 1) characterize social self-management trajectories over a 3-year period; 2) estimate the degree to which expressive nonverbal capacity predicts the trajectory; and 3) determine the moderating effect of gender on the association between expressive capacity and change in social self-management. Each participant will be assessed 14 times to detect rapid and non-linear changes in social participation and management of social activities; social network; and social comfort, general health and well-being.
This project will provide evidence to guide the development of interventions for supporting social integration of those living with Parkinson's disease, thus leading to improved overall health. It focuses on the novel construct of social self-management and known factors-expressive capacity and gender-that contribute to stigmatization. The repeated measures design detects triggers of rapid changes in social and health outcomes.
This paper describes a robotic-head system as a multimodal communication device for human-robot interaction, and the system's potential application in home environments. Most robotic systems for ...natural user interaction have facial expressions, since facial expressiveness is regarded as a key component to developing personal attachment along with prosodic expressiveness. In the first part of the paper is the description of our robotic head system Character Robot Face (CRF). A deformation approach and a parametric normalization scheme are proposed to produce facial expressions of nonhuman face models with high recognition rates. In the second half of the paper, CRF is endowed with artificial emotions and assigned tasks conceivable in home environments. A coordination mechanism between the robot's mood (an activated emotion) and its task is proposed so that the robot can, by referring to the emotion-task history, select a task depending on its current mood if there is no explicit task command from the user. When the robot performs a task, a particular emotion value gets boosted according to the same emotion-task history so that the emotion is more likely to be activated.
This paper presents part of an on-going project to design a wearable supportive device, in particular for the facial paralyzed patients to enhance facial expressiveness. As various complications can ...result in facial disfigurement and loss of functionality in facial muscles it is required to develop a supporting device for people with such conditions. The previously proposed robot mask, which consists of a head supporter and motor units attempts to recreate facial expressions artificially by pulling the facial skin through cables attached to the skin. Since a facial expression is the result of the full or partial activation of combination of facial muscles, it is necessary to control the amount of displacement of the artificially created skin movement. Furthermore, in order to facilitate interpersonal timing of facial expressions, it is necessary to be able to read the nerve signals and process them in real time. This paper presents a compact and fully controllable actuation unit for the earlier proposed robot mask, and analyzes the relationship between the displacement of the specifically selected areas of the face and the actuation by control unit. It also present a bioelectrical signal based real time signal processing system to determine the requirement for an artificial expression.
This paper presents part of an on-going project to design a wearable supportive device to enhance facial expressiveness, in particular for the facial paralyzed patients. Earlier we introduced the SMA ...actuator based Robot Mask that can be used to enhance the expressiveness of the face. The basic concept of that design was pulling of the skin through wires attached to the face and we explained the human anatomy based criteria of selecting these pulling points and directions. The major reason to use SMA instead of traditional actuators such as motors was their silent acting nature. However, their dynamic properties been governed by thermal energy and their mechanical properties been affected by the hysteresis due to their metallurgy, SMA based actuators tend not to perform too well under cooling. This paper introduces a novel controlling scenario that use the actuation of only a limited number of SMA wires out of the total connected in series on either sides of a slider to control the direction and amount of movement of the slider. The advantage of this method is by keeping some SMA wires at low temperatures it was possible to achieve a high speed of actuation even when the direction of motion was changed. This paper also investigates on the amount of actuation rates that are required to generate natural looking smiles and later attempts to recreate them using the proposed actuation unit.
Episode-by-episode indices of the duration and latency of facial expressions, coded during emotion- eliciting stimuli using the AFFEX coding system, were combined to create highly reliable and ...temporally stable composite measures of positive and negative responding. These were unrelated to maternal perceptions of temperament.
Faces Face to Face Broekman, Jan M.
The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education
Book Chapter
Peirce shows how he presupposes that a 'most general science of semeiotic' is entirely a miatter of culture. Semiotics unfolds even beyond the debate on specific differences between nature and ...culture. That insight leads not only to linguistic but also to other expressive phenomena, among which the human body. Faces are perhaps the most outstanding bodily carriers of signs and expressions, so that Peirce's analyses of Thirdness relate to the human face not as a natural, but as a cultural datum, in particular an artifice. The cases in this chapter show how the human face is an artifice and how realities can appear to be fictitious within patterns of semiotic nature. Any sign can thus be a correlative to a fictitious world.
PDF
