Investigating the Role of Culture on Negative Emotion Expressions in the Wild

Even though culture has been found to play some role in negative emotion expression, affective computing research primarily takes on a basic emotion approach when analyzing social signals for automatic emotion recognition technologies. Furthermore, automatic negative emotion recognition systems still train data that originates primarily from North America and contains a majority of Caucasian training samples. As such, the current study aims to address this problem by analyzing what the differences are of the underlying social signals by leveraging machine learning models to classify 3 negative emotions, contempt, anger and disgust (CAD) amongst 3 different cultures: North American, Persian, and Filipino. Using a curated data set compiled from YouTube videos, a support vector machine (SVM) was used to predict negative emotions amongst differing cultures. In addition a one-way ANOVA was used to analyse the differences that exist between each culture group in-terms of level of activation of underlying social signal. Our results not only highlighted the significant differences in the associated social signals that were activated for each culture, but also indicated the specific underlying social signals that differ in our cross-cultural data sets. Furthermore, the automatic classification methods showed North American expressions of CAD to be well-recognized, while Filipino and Persian expressions were recognized at near chance levels.