Is Micro-expression Ethnic Leaning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Khor, Huai-Qian, Li, Yante, Jiang, Xingxun, Zhao, Guoying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Khor, Huai-Qian
Li, Yante
Jiang, Xingxun
Zhao, Guoying
author_facet Khor, Huai-Qian
Li, Yante
Jiang, Xingxun
Zhao, Guoying
contents How much does ethnicity play its part in emotional expression? Emotional expression and micro-expression research probe into understanding human psychological responses to emotional stimuli, thereby revealing substantial hidden yet authentic emotions that can be useful in the event of diagnosis and interviews. While increased attention had been provided to micro-expression analysis, the studies were done under Ekman's assumption of emotion universality, where emotional expressions are identical across cultures and social contexts. Our computational study uncovers some of the influences of ethnic background in expression analysis, leading to an argument that the emotional universality hypothesis is an overgeneralization from the perspective of manual psychological analysis. In this research, we propose to investigate the level of influence of ethnicity in a simulated micro-expression scenario. We construct a cross-cultural micro-expression database and algorithmically annotate the ethnic labels to facilitate the investigation. With the ethnically annotated dataset, we perform a prima facie study to compare mono-ethnicity and stereo-ethnicity in a controlled environment, which uncovers a certain influence of ethnic bias via an experimental way. Building on this finding, we propose a framework that integrates ethnic context into the emotional feature learning process, yielding an ethnically aware framework that recognises ethnicity differences in micro-expression recognition. For improved understanding, qualitative analyses have been done to solidify the preliminary investigation into this new realm of research. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/IcedDoggie/ICMEW2025_EthnicMER
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10209
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is Micro-expression Ethnic Leaning?
Khor, Huai-Qian
Li, Yante
Jiang, Xingxun
Zhao, Guoying
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
How much does ethnicity play its part in emotional expression? Emotional expression and micro-expression research probe into understanding human psychological responses to emotional stimuli, thereby revealing substantial hidden yet authentic emotions that can be useful in the event of diagnosis and interviews. While increased attention had been provided to micro-expression analysis, the studies were done under Ekman's assumption of emotion universality, where emotional expressions are identical across cultures and social contexts. Our computational study uncovers some of the influences of ethnic background in expression analysis, leading to an argument that the emotional universality hypothesis is an overgeneralization from the perspective of manual psychological analysis. In this research, we propose to investigate the level of influence of ethnicity in a simulated micro-expression scenario. We construct a cross-cultural micro-expression database and algorithmically annotate the ethnic labels to facilitate the investigation. With the ethnically annotated dataset, we perform a prima facie study to compare mono-ethnicity and stereo-ethnicity in a controlled environment, which uncovers a certain influence of ethnic bias via an experimental way. Building on this finding, we propose a framework that integrates ethnic context into the emotional feature learning process, yielding an ethnically aware framework that recognises ethnicity differences in micro-expression recognition. For improved understanding, qualitative analyses have been done to solidify the preliminary investigation into this new realm of research. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/IcedDoggie/ICMEW2025_EthnicMER
title Is Micro-expression Ethnic Leaning?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10209