AUTHOR=Schneider Jan N. , Brick Timothy R. , Dziobek Isabel TITLE=Distance to the Neutral Face Predicts Arousal Ratings of Dynamic Facial Expressions in Individuals With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=11 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.577494 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.577494 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=
Arousal is one of the dimensions of core affect and frequently used to describe experienced or observed emotional states. While arousal ratings of facial expressions are collected in many studies it is not well understood how arousal is displayed in or interpreted from facial expressions. In the context of socioemotional disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, this poses the question of a differential use of facial information for arousal perception. In this study, we demonstrate how automated face-tracking tools can be used to extract predictors of arousal judgments. We find moderate to strong correlations among all measures of static information on one hand and all measures of dynamic information on the other. Based on these results, we tested two measures, average distance to the neutral face and average facial movement speed, within and between neurotypical individuals (