The Underlying Emotional and Facial Dynamics of Positive Affect

Positive and negative affects underlying facial expressions are detected and perceived by facial cues, markers and physiological responses. Therefore, the facial cues, markers and physiological responses are important in detecting and perching emotional states. For example, researchers have found that the area of the eye dominates individual’s perception and classification of faces. As well, researchers have found that higher skin conductance levels are indicative of increased emotional arousal. Also, a recent study demonstrates stereotyping biases in infants as it found that infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces to angry music. Therefore, these studies demonstrate that facial and emotion perception and cognition is influenced by many variables.
Building on this, foundational research by Dr. Lee has demonstrated the negative and positive affect have not been analyzed in depth. This research study plans to extend on previous work to investigate the facial and physiological markers that are associated with positive affect, and the factors that account for differences in positive affect emotions. Overall, this study plans to analyze positive affect and physiological processes involved in emotion response, detection and perception through multimodal methods.
It is expected that there will be significant differences in facial and physiological responses derived

Faculty Supervisor:

Kang Lee

Student:

Partner:

Zhejiang University

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

University of Toronto

Program: