Using Actor Portrayals to Systematically Study Multimodal Emotion Expression: The GEMEP Corpus

摘要

Emotion research is intrinsically confronted with a serious difficulty to access pertinent data. For both practical and ethical reasons, genuine and intense emotions are problematic to induce in the laboratory; and sampling sufficient data to capture an adequate variety of emotional episodes requires extensive resources. For researchers interested in emotional expressivity and nonverbal communication of emotion, this situation is further complicated by the pervasiveness of expressive regulations. Given that emotional expressions are likely to be regulated in most situations of our daily lives, spontaneous emotional expressions are especially difficult to access. We argue in this paper that, in view of the needs of current research programs in this field, well-designed corpora of acted emotion portrayals can play a useful role. We present some of the arguments motivating the creation of a multimodal corpus of emotion portrayals (Geneva Multimodal Emotion Portrayal, GEMEP) and discuss its overall benefits and limitations for emotion research.