The Complex Emotion Expression Database: A Validated Stimulus Set of Trained Actors

The Complex Emotion Expression Database (CEED) is a digital stimulus set of 243 basic and 237 complex emotional facial expressions aimed at facilitating research in complex expression perception and processing. Stimulus Acquisition and Processing The stimuli in CEED represent 6 basic expressions (angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, sad, and surprised) and 9 complex expressions (affectionate, attracted, betrayed, brokenhearted, contemptuous, desirous, flirtatious, jealous, and lovesick) that were posed by Black and White formally trained, young adult actors. The actors used a method acting approach and were provided with definitions and examples of each expression before they posed the expressions themselves. All of the images are greyscaled and standardized to a resolution of 300 dpi and a width of 4 inches. Some of the images were cropped to only include the head and neck of the actor, while others include the shoulders of the actor and some of the wall in the background. Stimulus Validation All images were validated by a minimum of 50 adults in a 4-alternative forced choice task (4AFC) that was administered on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Only images for which greater than or equal to 50% raters endorsed the correct emotion label were included in the final database. Information regarding the number and gender of raters, the percentage of raters who chose each answer choice, and the answer choices given in the 4AFC task are provided in the folder "Stimulus Information."