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Across Cultures: A Cognitive and Computational Analysis of Emotional and Conversational Facial Expressions in Germany and Korea

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Recent Progress in Brain and Cognitive Engineering

Part of the book series: Trends in Augmentation of Human Performance ((TAHP,volume 5))

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Abstract

Humans use a wide variety of communicative signals – among those, facial expressions play a key role in communicating not only emotional, but also more general, non-verbal signals. Here, we present results from a combined cognitive and computational analysis of emotional and conversational facial expressions in the context of cross-cultural research. Using two large databases of dynamic facial expressions, we show that both Western and Asian observers structure the interpretation space of a large range of facial expressions using the same two evaluative dimensions (valence and arousal). In addition, several computational experiments show the advantage of using graph-models for automatic recognition of facial expressions, since these models are able to capture the complex dynamics and inter-dependence of the movements of facial features in the face.

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Correspondence to Christian Wallraven .

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Wallraven, C., Hur, DC., Shin, A. (2015). Across Cultures: A Cognitive and Computational Analysis of Emotional and Conversational Facial Expressions in Germany and Korea. In: Lee, SW., Bülthoff, H., Müller, KR. (eds) Recent Progress in Brain and Cognitive Engineering. Trends in Augmentation of Human Performance, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7239-6_7

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