Correspondence of emotional self-rating with facial expression

Emotional processing abilities are difficult to measure psychometrically. Ultimately their quantification has to rely on 'subjective' judgment thereby leaving open the problem of response biases. Assessments of autonomic arousal similarly provide a mere unspecified measurement of a specific emotion. A standardized mood induction procedure capable of obtaining reliable happy and sad mood changes in healthy subjects was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this procedure. We performed a two-part experiment using a rater-based analysis of facial expressions. This entailed analyzing the emotion portrayed in the faces. The faces of 24 healthy subjects were videotaped during the mood induction procedure of happiness and sadness, respectively. A group of 20 raters naive to the experimental task and conditions rated the facial expressions on six basic emotions. Results showed that ratings corresponded with the facial expressions, which were reflecting the mood of the task condition. Subjects' facial expressions together with self-ratings demonstrate the successful applicability of this standardized mood induction procedure for eliciting happy and sad mood.