Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotions: Standardization of Pictures for Emotion Matching Tasks

Abstract

 Emotions play a significant role in human interaction and facial expressions are very important route to communicate emotion. The aims of the present study were to provide standards of the 83 photographs with facial expressions of basic emotions that compose the Emotion Matching Task (EMT) for the Brazilian population and compare the results with the standards obtained for the North-American sample, analyzing cultural similarities and differences. The subjects of this study were 80 undergraduate students from Salvador (Bahia, Brazil). Each photograph, presented sequentially through visual projection, was judged in terms of the emotion that best matched the facial expression. The results showed a good agreement level in the judgment of the photographs. The Brazilian and North-American samples judged 95.2% of the images as expressing the same emotion. The present study corroborates the hypothesis on the universality of basic emotions, provides standardized images or the use of the EMT in the Brazilian population and reveals cultural differences in the intensity judgment of emotional expressions.