Depression's Effect on Voluntary Facial Mimicry in Adolescents: Insights for Intervention

Depressed patients have been proven to have deficiencies in their mimicry behavior. This study aims to explore the differences in voluntary facial mimicry behaviors between adolescents with mild or moderate depression and healthy individuals, with the goal of providing insights for the early diagnosis and monitoring of depression. The data include images of eight types of voluntary facial mimicry (VFM) from 10 healthy individuals and 6 patients with depression. Through detailed identification of the participants' facial expressions, this paper further classifies these expressions into three main categories: Positive, Negative, and Surprise, and discusses the differences between these categories. Using a visual analysis approach, the study employs minimized feature extraction from regions of interest (ROI) and validates the effectiveness of pretrained models. The results indicate that while the experimental group showed similar performance to the control group in mimicking happiness expressions, they exhibited significant deficiencies in mimicking anger, fear, and neutral expressions, with an overall accuracy significantly lower than that of the control group. Moreover, although there was no significant difference in the overall accuracy between the control group across the three major categories, there were significant differences in the Positive and Surprise categories when compared to healthy individuals.