2014 SRE Project

A Dynamic Systems Approach to Tracking the Facial Expressions and Conscious Experience of Emotion

Mentors:
Dr. Jeff Larsen
Dr. Charles Collins

We will track people's emotional reactions to bittersweet stimuli (e.g., poignant film clips) by measuring moment-to-moment changes in (a) the facial musculature, as indexed both by videographic records and electromyographic measures of the electrical activity over the muscles that produce facial microexpressions (e.g., cheek, brow) and (b) the conscious experience of emotions (i.e., "feelings"). Students' will first develop algorithms for processing and merging the videographic, electromyographic, and self-report signals, some of which will be sampled at rates as high as 1000 samples/second. Students will then use a dynamical systems approach to model the time course of people's emotional reactions to bittersweet events.

Student participants, from left: Kelly Moran, Mathematics (Biology Concentration), Clemson University; Marina Massaro, Mathematics, SUNY, Geneseo; Benjamin Roberson, Computer Science, UT-Knoxville

Products

Abstract of project report (PDF)

Return to SRE 2014.

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From 2008 until early 2021, NIMBioS was supported by the National Science Foundation through NSF Award #DBI-1300426, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.