“The NimStim set of facial expressions: Judgments from untrained research participants”, by Tottenham et al. (2009) will be discussed in this project.
The NimStem Set of Facial Expressions is an extensive dataset, portrayed by various genders and races, which covers multiple emotional expressions (Tottenham et al., 2009). The images included in this dataset cover eight emotional expressions – disgust, neutral, angry, surprise, happy, calm, sad and afraid. They cover both open and closed mouth versions, with exception of surprise (only open) and happy (high arousal open mouth/exuberant). The 672 images contain naturally posed photographs of 43 professional actors (18 female, 25 male), with an age range of 21 to 30. Actors were of African-American (N = 10), Asian-American (N = 6), European-American (N = 25), and Latino-American (N = 2) descent. Researchers have free access to the stimuli here: http://www.macbrain.org/resources.htm.
Two excel files containing the coding key and the data are available on this study’s OSF project page (available here: https://osf.io/w98qj/). The first file “individual_scores_MODELs1_20.xls” has information regarding the coding scheme. The coding instructions for researchers are the following: “surprise” = 2, “happy” = 3, “neutral” = 4, “calm” = 5, “disgust” = 6, “angry” = 7, “sad” = 8, “none of the above” = 9, “afraid” = 10. Interestingly if the participants mixed up responses for “calm” and “neutral”, they were still counted as correct. Additionally, this file also contained the participants’ responses to the photographs of the first 20 actors. The second file “individual_scores_MODELs1_21-43.xls” had the participants’ responses to the photographs of the rest of the 23 actors. These responses were first divided based on whether the expressions were open or closed mouth, then sub-divided based on the type of emotion being expressed, and finally by the actor’s gender.
The NimSet Set of Facial Expressions is a broadly known dataset and by now it has been widely used in the literature, having been cited over 2000 times over the years. Various research areas have been studied using this face stimuli, such as emotion recognition in autism (Rump, Giovannelli, Minshew, & Strauss, 2009), adolescents’ risky behavior (Pfeifer, Masten, Moore III, Oswald, Mazziotta, Iacoboni, & Dapretto, 2011), and major depressive disorder (Victor, Furey, Fromm, Öhman, & Drevets, 2010), to name a few. Since its publication, it has contributed significantly to the research involving brain imaging technologies, in particular regarding activation levels in the amygdala (Tsuchiya, Moradi, Felsen, Yamazaki, & Adolphs, 2009; Tottenham et al., 2011). This face stimuli has helped research investigate how various cohorts interpret and understand facial expressions and emotional cues.
References
Pfeifer, J. H., Masten, C. L., Moore III, W. E., Oswald, T. M., Mazziotta, J. C., Iacoboni, M., & Dapretto, M. (2011). Entering adolescence: resistance to peer influence, risky behavior, and neural changes in emotion reactivity. Neuron, 69(5), 1029-1036.
Rump, K. M., Giovannelli, J. L., Minshew, N. J., & Strauss, M. S. (2009). The development of emotion recognition in individuals with autism. Child development, 80(5), 1434-1447.
Tottenham, N., Hare, T. A., Millner, A., Gilhooly, T., Zevin, J. D., & Casey, B. J. (2011). Elevated amygdala response to faces following early deprivation. Developmental science, 14(2), 190-204.
Tottenham, N., Tanaka, J. W., Leon, A. C., McCarry, T., Nurse, M., Hare, T. A., ... & Nelson, C. (2009). The NimStim set of facial expressions: judgments from untrained research participants. Psychiatry research, 168(3), 242-249.
Tsuchiya, N., Moradi, F., Felsen, C., Yamazaki, M., & Adolphs, R. (2009). Intact rapid detection of fearful faces in the absence of the amygdala. Nature neuroscience, 12(10), 1224.
Victor, T. A., Furey, M. L., Fromm, S. J., Öhman, A., & Drevets, W. C. (2010). Relationship between amygdala responses to masked faces and mood state and treatment in major depressive disorder. Archives of general psychiatry, 67(11), 1128-1138.
