The Belfast Induced Natural Emotion Database

For many years psychological research on facial expression of emotion has relied heavily on a recognition paradigm based on posed static photographs. There is growing evidence that there may be fundamental differences between the expressions depicted in such stimuli and the emotional expressions present in everyday life. Affective computing, with its pragmatic emphasis on realism, needs examples of natural emotion. This paper describes a unique database containing recordings of mild to moderate emotionally coloured responses to a series of laboratory based emotion induction tasks. The recordings are accompanied by information on self-report of emotion and intensity, continuous trace-style ratings of valence and intensity, the sex of the participant, the sex of the experimenter, the active or passive nature of the induction task and it gives researchers the opportunity to compare expressions from people from more than one culture.

Sex differences in fetal habituation

There is some evidence for sex differences in habituation in the human fetus, but it is unknown whether this is due to differences in central processing (habituation) or in more peripheral processes, sensory or motor, involved in the response. This study examined whether the sex of the fetus influenced auditory habituation at 33weeks of gestation, and whether this was due to differences in habituation or in the sensory or motor components using a set of four experiments. The first experiment found that female fetuses required significantly fewer stimulus presentations to habituate than males. The second experiment revealed no difference in the spontaneous motor behaviour of male and female fetuses. The third experiment examined auditory intensity thresholds for the stimuli used to habituate the fetus. No differences in thresholds were found between males and females, although there was inter-individual variability in thresholds. A final experiment, using stimuli individualized for that particular fetus' auditory intensity threshold, found that female fetuses habituated faster than males. In combination, the studies reveal that habituation in the human fetus is affected by sex and this is due to a difference in central 'information processing' of the stimuli rather than peripheral aspects of the response. It is argued that male and female fetuses present different neurobehavioural developmental trajectories, with females more advanced at 33weeks than males. This study suggests that research examining prenatal behaviour should consider the factor of fetal sex. This may be particularly pertinent where there is an intention to use the results diagnostically. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.