Iranian Emotional Face Database: Acquisition and Validation of a Stimulus Set of Basic Facial Expressions

Facial expressions play an essential role in social interactions. Databases of face images have furnished theories of emotion perception, as well as having applications in other disciplines such as facial recognition technology. However, the faces of many ethnicities remain largely underrepresented in the existing face databases, which can impact the generalizability of the theories and technologies developed based on them. Here, we present the first survey-validated database of Iranian faces. It consists of 248 images from 40 Iranian individuals portraying six motional expressions – anger, sadness, fear, disgust, happiness, and surprise – as well as the neutral state. The photos were taken in a studio setting, following the common scenarios of emotion induction, and controlling for conditions of lighting, camera set up, and model's head posture. An evaluation survey confirmed a high agreement between the models’ intended expressions and the raters’ perception of them. The database is freely available online for academic research purposes.