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General Psychology Science Fair Project

Facial Expressions and Emotion Recognition

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Facial Expressions and Emotion Recognition | Science Fair Projects | STEM Projects
How well can you read emotions from a face? Some expressions are easy to spot. Others fool almost everyone. You photograph four people showing 12 different emotions. Happiness, anger, fear, surprise, and boredom are just a few. Then you show the photos to 10 participants and ask them to name each emotion. Tally the correct guesses for each emotion. You may find that some feelings are much harder to identify than others.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis is that facial expressions can be used to communicate emotions.

Science Concepts Learned

Facial Expression

Face muscles move to show what a person feels. Some looks are easy to read, but others fool most people. When ten people try to name 12 emotions from photos, some feelings are much harder to spot than others.

Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition depends on reading a face accurately. Photographing four people as they show happiness, anger, fear, surprise, and other feelings creates a test set. Asking ten participants to name each emotion measures how well people read faces.

Method & Materials

You will take pictures of four assistants displaying different emotions, and then have ten participants guess the emotion in each picture.
You will need four assistants, a camera, a cell phone or tablet with a camera, and ten participants.

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Results

After the experiment, the results showed that participants were able to accurately identify the emotions in the pictures. The emotion that was identified correctly most often was happiness, while the emotion that was mistakenly identified most often was confusion.

Why do this project?

This science project is interesting because it explores the idea that facial expressions can be used to communicate emotions.

Also Consider

Variations of this experiment could include having participants guess the emotion in videos instead of pictures, or having participants guess the emotion in pictures of animals instead of people.

Full project details

Additional information and source material for this project are available below.

Related videos

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