Sticky Emotion Analysis is a facial expression recognition tool that automatically codes the expressions of people. It detects facial expressions from images, webpages and videos and returns the probability distribution of each of the six universal emotions.
Sticky Emotion Analysis works by using opt-in participants to watch your media and tracking their facial expressions through their webcams to pinpoint emotional activity in response to frames and elements in your media. Used in conjunction with eye tracking, you’ll be able to tell not just what people are feeling as they watch the video, but exactly what they’re looking at on-screen when they feel that emotion.
By checking in "Add emotion data" when designing your experiment, Sticky will automatically analyze all participant recordings and return emotion data for your experiment.
Visualizations and metrics
The Emotions line charts display emotion intensity, mood and valence over time.
Emotion intensity
In the Emotion intensity graph the x-axis represents the time segment in the media based on seconds and the y-axis represents emotion intensity. Each emotion is plotted in a different color.
The number on the y-axis shows the intensity level of specific emotions for each time frame - i.e. not necessarily the number of people expressing the emotion. Simply put, the number is the compound output of two variables; (a) the number of people expressing an emotion and (b) the intensity by which they are expressing it. Basically, this means that the number shown is the sum of each person’s individual emotion intensity at a specific time step divided by the total number of persons in the test (n), where the individual emotion intensity is a number between 0 and 100.
Sticky Emotion Analysis detects emotional expressions in the face and can identify six universal emotions:
- Anger/Puzzlement - symbolized by eyebrows lowering, lips pressing firmly and eyes bulging
- Fear - symbolized by the upper eyelids raising, eyes opening and the lips stretching horizontally
- Sadness - symbolized by lowering of the mouth corners, the eyebrows descending to inner corners and the eyelids drooping
- Disgust - symbolized by the upper lip raising, nose bridge wrinkling and cheeks raising
- Joy - symbolized by raising of the mouth corners (an obvious smile) and tightening of the eyelids
- Surprise - symbolized by eyebrows arching, eyes opening wide and with the jaw dropping slightly
Mood
Mood describes the intensity of positive emotions and negative emotions respectively.
Positive Mood = Intensity of Joy.
Negative Mood = Intensity of the negative emotion with the highest intensity. Anger/puzzlement, fear, sadness and disgust are considered negative emotions.
Valence
Emotional valence describes the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative. Valence indicates whether a person’s emotional status is positive, negative or neutral. Positive valence is evoked by joy. Negative valence is for example evoked by anger or fear.
Valence = Positive Mood minus Negative Mood. Valence is always a value between -100 and +100.
Raw data file
You can easily download a raw data file in excel format by clicking on Download in the bottom toolbar. Emotion intensity and mood will be a value between 0 and 1 and valence a value between -1 and +1.
