How Fast are the Leaked Facial Expressions: The Duration of Micro-Expressions

By Wen-Jing Yan, Qi Wu, Jing Liang, Yu-Hsin Chen, Xiaolan Fu. 2013

434 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Micro-expression has gained a lot of attention because of its potential applications (e.g., transportation security) and theoretical implications (e.g., expression of emotions). However, the duration of micro-expression, which is considered as the most important characteristic, has not been firmly established. The present study provides evidence to define the duration of micro-expression by collecting and analyzing the fast facial expressions which are the leakage of genuine emotions. Participants were asked to neutralize their faces while watching emotional video episodes. Among the more than 1,000 elicited facial expressions, 109 leaked fast expressions (less than 500 ms) were selected and analyzed. The distribution curves of total duration and onset duration for the micro-expressions were presented. Based on the distribution and estimation, it seems suitable to define micro-expression by its total duration less than 500 ms or its onset duration less than 260 ms. These findings may facilitate further studies of micro-expressions in the future.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Information Systems, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d00b3dbcb6dd8321467516a62b62579c2d2b271

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Citations in the corpus

The EMPATHIC Framework for Task Learning from Implicit Human Feedback (2020, background): “[18] W.”
Video-Based Facial Micro-Expression Analysis: A Survey of Datasets, Features and Algorithms (2021, methodology): “[7] performed an elegant analysis that employed distribution curves of total duration and onset duration for the purposes of microexpression analysis.”
A Main Directional Mean Optical Flow Feature for Spontaneous Micro-Expression Recognition (2016, background): “First, micro-expressions are rapid facial movements, typically occurring in less than 0.5 second [11].”
Towards Reading Hidden Emotions: A Comparative Study of Spontaneous Micro-Expression Spotting and Recognition Methods (2015, background): “By asking people to perform expressions as quickly as possible one can obtain posed MEs, but they are different from spontaneous ones in both spatial and temporal properties [2], [4].”
SAMM: A Spontaneous Micro-Facial Movement Dataset (2018, background): “The duration of a micro-expression is very short and is considered the main feature that distinguishes them from a facial expression [4], with the general standard being no more than 500 ms [5].”
CASME II: An Improved Spontaneous Micro-Expression Database and the Baseline Evaluation (2014, methodology): “A micro-expression is a brief facial movement which reveals a genuine emotion that a person tries to conceal [1–3].”