Facial Expressions in an Ordinary Conversation among Kabardinians: A Facial Analysis Employing the FaceReader System

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the facial expressions of men and women that occur during conversation and independently of the emotional context. The experiment involved 115 young Kabardian men and women. Participants engaged in a 20-second conversation on a neutral topic in front of a camera in a separate room, while the experimenter stood at some distance and controlled the recording start and stop. The video recordings were subsequently analyzed using the FaceReader system for recognizing emotional expressions, which captures visible skin surface changes by breaking them down into 20 functional movement units (Action Units, AU). The results showed that both men and women demonstrated lowintensity movements during the conversation, which did not reach the visibility threshold for an untrained observer. However, certain sex differences were identified among these movements. Women exhibited more expressive movements in the areas of the eyes, nose, and lips, compared to men. Furthermore, female facial expressions differed from male ones in terms of greater diversity of expressions both in combinations of movement elements (AU) and in the number of those combinations.