The McGill Face Database: Validation and Insights Into the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Complex Mental States
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current databases of facial expressions represent only a small subset of expressions, usually the basic emotions (fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness, and anger). To overcome these limitations, we introduce a database of pictures of facial expressions reflecting the richness of mental states. A total of 93 expressions of mental states were interpreted by two professional actors, and high-quality pictures were taken under controlled conditions in front and side view. The database was validated in two experiments. First, a four-alternative forced-choice paradigm was employed to test the ability to select a term associated with each expression. Second, the task was to locate each face within a 2-D space of valence and arousal. Results from both experiments demonstrate that subjects can reliably recognize a great diversity of emotional states from facial expressions. While subjects’ performance was better for front view images, the advantage over the side view was not dramatic. This is the first demonstration of the high degree of accuracy human viewers exhibit when identifying complex mental states from only partially visible facial features. The McGill Face Database provides a wide range of facial expressions that can be linked to mental state terms and can be accurately characterized in terms of arousal and valence.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it