Crowdsouring in emotion studies across time and culture

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly popular as a cheap and effective tool for multimedia annotation. However, the idea is not new, and can be traced back to Charles Darwin. He was interested in studying the universality of facial expressions in conveying emotions, thus he had to consider a global population. Access to different cultures allowed him to reach more general conclusions. In this paper, we highlight a few milestones in the history of the study of emotion that share the concepts of crowdsourcing. We first consider the study of posed photographs and then move to videos of natural expressions. We present our use of crowdsouring to label a video corpus of natural expressions, and also to recreate one of Darwin's original emotion judgment experiments. This allows us to compare people's perception of emotional expressions in the 19th and 21st centuries, showing that it remains stable through both culture and time.