The Face of Populism: Examining Differences in Facial Emotional Expressions of Political Leaders Using Machine Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Major, Sara, Tomašević, Aleksandar
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Major, Sara
Tomašević, Aleksandar
author_facet Major, Sara
Tomašević, Aleksandar
contents Populist rhetoric employed on online media is characterized as deeply impassioned and often imbued with strong emotions. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the differences in affective nonverbal communication of political leaders. We use a deep-learning approach to process a sample of 220 YouTube videos of political leaders from 15 different countries, analyze their facial expressions of emotion and then examine differences in average emotion scores representing the relative presence of 6 emotional states (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral expression for each frame of the YouTube video. Based on a sample of manually coded images, we find that this deep-learning approach has 53-60\% agreement with human labels. We observe statistically significant differences in the average score of negative emotions between groups of leaders with varying degrees of populist rhetoric.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_09914
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Face of Populism: Examining Differences in Facial Emotional Expressions of Political Leaders Using Machine Learning
Major, Sara
Tomašević, Aleksandar
Computers and Society
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
J.4
Populist rhetoric employed on online media is characterized as deeply impassioned and often imbued with strong emotions. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the differences in affective nonverbal communication of political leaders. We use a deep-learning approach to process a sample of 220 YouTube videos of political leaders from 15 different countries, analyze their facial expressions of emotion and then examine differences in average emotion scores representing the relative presence of 6 emotional states (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral expression for each frame of the YouTube video. Based on a sample of manually coded images, we find that this deep-learning approach has 53-60\% agreement with human labels. We observe statistically significant differences in the average score of negative emotions between groups of leaders with varying degrees of populist rhetoric.
title The Face of Populism: Examining Differences in Facial Emotional Expressions of Political Leaders Using Machine Learning
topic Computers and Society
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
J.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.09914