Identification of Emotional Facial Expressions in the Lab and Over the Internet

Collecting data over the internet is an approach that allows researchers to vastly expand the possible sample sizes of their studies, and allows them to study population that may otherwise be difficult to access. However, to insure that data collected over the internet is of the same level of quality as data collected in the lab, the suitability for internet data collection must first be assessed for individual areas of research and experimental approaches. To answer the question of whether internet data collection is suitable for experiments involving facial expressions faces, we conducted a facial emotion-identification experiment where participants completed the same task either under supervision in our lab, or at home over the internet. Stimuli consisted of sad faces, which participants were asked to identify as resembling anger, fear, or disgust. Regardless of belonging to either the group tested in the lab or over the internet, participants showed highly similar response distributions while differences between the groups were non-significant and of very low magnitude. We can therefore conclude from our findings that internet data collection is a viable method for experiments requiring the identification of emotional facial expressions.