Facial photographs for the Himba study

From How Emotions Are Made
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Chapter 3 endnote 14, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

We’d created a set of photos using dark-skinned actors, because our originals featured Western faces that didn’t look like Himba tribespeople.

Lacking members of the Himba cultural group in Massachusetts, U.S.A., we selected photographs of the darkest-skinned people we could find who were posing Western-style stereotyped expressions. Then we asked some Western subjects to compare these photos with faces of Himba tribespeople and choose the ones most structurally similar to Himba facial morphology. In the end, we culled six photos for each of six categories: “happy” smiles, “sad” pouts, “angry” scowls, wide-eyed “fear,” nose-wrinkled “disgust,” and neutral.