Do You Know How I Feel? Evaluating Emotional Display of Primary and Secondary Emotions

Abstract

In this paper we report on an empirical study on how well different facial expressions of primary and secondary emotions [2] can be recognized from the face of our emotional virtual human Max [1]. Primary emotions like happiness are more primitive, onto-genetically earlier types of emotions, which are expressed by direct mapping on basic emotion display; secondary emotions like relief or gloating are considered cognitively more elaborated emotions and require a more subtle rendition. In order to validate the design of our virtual agent, which entails devising facial expressions for both kinds of emotion, we tried to find answers to the questions: How well can emotions be read from a virtual agent’s face by human observers? Are there differences in the recognizability between more primitve primary and more cognitively elaborated secondary emotions?