In this project, we were asked to participate in an emotion perception survey where we had to write a descriptive word given picture. After that, we were asked to summarize the emotion word for each condition and expression or story and interpret what the patterns tell about the perception of emotion. Below is my group’s findings:
Our group found that subjects reached a greater consensus when they were presented with both a face and a story. When only one representation is given, there’s a variety of words used and a large range of emotional descriptions as being positive or negative, intense or light. There was the least consensus when there was only an image of a face shown because many of these face snapshots have vague or ambiguous emotions. Even if the emotional words were different, they were all either positive or negative. We did notice slightly more overall consensus for negative emotions. Overall, the valence of emotions was fairly consistent throughout the face, story, and both, with a few exceptions. In a few instances, the valence would switch between the story and both the face and story combined. Without the proper context of a story, it is difficult to parse the specific emotions of a given picture, leading to some scattershot conclusions in data pertaining to the faces when they are by themselves.
