Facial Expression Analysis Interpreting Emotion in Multicultural Settings

Facial expressions are a vital part of nonverbal communication and are used to convey a wide range of emotions. Recent works have suggested that cultural and societal factors may influence how people express and interpret facial expressions of emotion. This study explores image features of facial expressions of the same emotion in two different cultures, Thai and Japanese, to identify features that are common and different among expressions across cultures. To achieve this goal, we collected facial expression samples from entertainment media in Thailand and Japan. The subspace techniques are applied to create feature spaces that represent facial expressions from these samples and to extract image features that can reveal differences in facial expressions between pairs of emotions in both cultures. Our study finds evidence that suggests sufficient distinctions between expressions of some emotions in both cultures, particularly happy and disgust classes, while the character of the surprise class is similar across Thai and Japanese samples.