Preliminary Evaluation of a Web-Oriented Assessment Tool for Emotion Recognition

Perceiving and identifying emotions on facial expressions is one of the basic abilities that compose emotional intelligence, and is crucial for normal social functions. It is well documented that facial expression conveys information about felt emotion, and that expressive behavior can activate or regulate the emotion required by a given situation. Instruments measuring emotion perception based on facial expression have been found in literature either as stand-alone scales or as part of other tests. The proposed tool expands existing instruments to combine online availability while affording assessment of emotion recognition on a continuum of intensity. It was founded on Ekman's Facial Action Units, with two Virtual Characters (male and female) portraying five basic emotions Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Sadness, plus Neutral expression. The user can navigate on the custom-made pentagon and choose the emotion and intensity level (1-5) through a single click. The preliminary evaluation of the tool on thirty normal subjects provided threshold data that can later be used as benchmarks to assess emotion perception sensitivity in psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia characterized by emotional dysfunction.