The relationship between nonverbal behavior and severity of depression was investigated by following depressed participants over the course of treatment and video recording a series of clinical interviews. Facial expressions and head pose were analyzed from video using manual and automatic systems. Both systems were highly consistent for FACS action units (AUs) and showed similar effects for change over time in depression severity. When symptom severity was high, participants made fewer affiliative facial expressions (AUs 12 and 15) and more non-affiliative facial expressions (AU 14). Participants also exhibited diminished head motion (i.e., amplitude and velocity) when symptom severity was high. These results are consistent with the Social Withdrawal hypothesis: that depressed individuals use nonverbal behavior to maintain or increase interpersonal distance. As individuals recover, they send more signals indicating a willingness to affiliate. The finding that automatic facial expression analysis was both consistent with manual coding and revealed the same pattern of findings suggests that automatic facial expression analysis may be ready to relieve the burden of manual coding in behavioral and clinical science.

Previous efforts suggest that occurrence of pain can be detected from the face. Can intensity of pain be detected as well? The Prkachin and Solomon Pain Intensity (PSPI) metric was used to classify four levels of pain intensity (none, trace, weak, and strong) in 25 participants with previous shoulder injury (McMaster-UNBC Pain Archive). Participants were recorded while they completed a series of movements of their affected and unaffected shoulders. From the video recordings, canonical normalized appearance of the face (CAPP) was extracted using active appearance modeling. To control for variation in face size, all CAPP were rescaled to 96x96 pixels. CAPP then was passed through a set of Log-Normal filters consisting of 7 frequencies and 15 orientations to extract 9216 features. To detect pain level, 4 support vector machines (SVMs) were separately trained for the automatic measurement of pain intensity on a frame-by-frame level using both 5-folds cross-validation and leave-one-subjectout cross-validation. F1 for each level of pain intensity ranged from 91% to 96% and from 40% to 67% for 5-folds and leaveone-subject-out cross-validation, respectively. Intra-class correlation, which assesses the consistency of continuous pain intensity between manual and automatic PSPI was 0.85 and 0.55 for 5-folds and leave-one-subject-out cross-validation, respectively, which suggests moderate to high consistency. These findings show that pain intensity can be reliably measured from facial expression in participants with orthopedic injury.

Depression is one of the most common psychiatric disorders worldwide, with over 350 million people affected. Current methods to screen for and assess depression depend almost entirely on clinical interviews and self-report scales. While useful, such measures lack objective, systematic, and efficient ways of incorporating behavioral observations that are strong indicators of depression presence and severity. Using dynamics of facial and head movement and vocalization, we trained classifiers to detect three levels of depression severity. Participants were a community sample diagnosed with major depressive disorder. They were recorded in clinical interview (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression, HRSD) at 7-week intervals over a period of 21 weeks. At each interview, they were scored by HRSD as moderately to severely depressed, mildly depressed, or remitted. Logistic regression classifiers using leave-one-participant-out validation were compared for facial movement, head movement, and vocal prosody individually and in combination. Accuracy of depression severity measurement from facial movement dynamics was higher than that for head movement dynamics; and each was substantially higher than that for vocal prosody. Accuracy using all three modalities combined only marginally exceeded that of face and head combined. These findings suggest that automatic detection of depression severity from behavioral indicators in patients is feasible and that multimodal measures afford most powerful detection.

BackgroundDeficits in motor movement in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have typically been characterized qualitatively by human observers. Although clinicians have noted the importance of atypical head positioning (e.g. social peering and repetitive head banging) when diagnosing children with ASD, a quantitative understanding of head movement in ASD is lacking. Here, we conduct a quantitative comparison of head movement dynamics in children with and without ASD using automated, person-independent computer-vision based head tracking (Zface). Because children with ASD often exhibit preferential attention to nonsocial versus social stimuli, we investigated whether children with and without ASD differed in their head movement dynamics depending on stimulus sociality.MethodsThe current study examined differences in head movement dynamics in children with (n = 21) and without ASD (n = 21). Children were video-recorded while watching a 16-min video of social and nonsocial stimuli. Three dimensions of rigid head movement—pitch (head nods), yaw (head turns), and roll (lateral head inclinations)—were tracked using Zface. The root mean square of pitch, yaw, and roll was calculated to index the magnitude of head angular displacement (quantity of head movement) and angular velocity (speed).ResultsCompared with children without ASD, children with ASD exhibited greater yaw displacement, indicating greater head turning, and greater velocity of yaw and roll, indicating faster head turning and inclination. Follow-up analyses indicated that differences in head movement dynamics were specific to the social rather than the nonsocial stimulus condition.ConclusionsHead movement dynamics (displacement and velocity) were greater in children with ASD than in children without ASD, providing a quantitative foundation for previous clinical reports. Head movement differences were evident in lateral (yaw and roll) but not vertical (pitch) movement and were specific to a social rather than nonsocial condition. When presented with social stimuli, children with ASD had higher levels of head movement and moved their heads more quickly than children without ASD. Children with ASD may use head movement to modulate their perception of social scenes.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13229-018-0198-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Current methods for depression assessment depend almost entirely on clinical interview or selfreport ratings. Such measures lack systematic and efficient ways of incorporating behavioral observations that are strong indicators of psychological disorder. We compared a clinical interview of depression severity with automatic measurement in 48 participants undergoing treatment for depression. Interviews were obtained at 7-week intervals on up to four occasions. Following standard cut-offs, participants at each session were classified as remitted, intermediate, or depressed. Logistic regression classifiers using leave-one-out validation were compared for facial movement dynamics, head movement dynamics, and vocal prosody individually and in combination. Accuracy (remitted versus depressed) for facial movement dynamics was higher than that for head movement dynamics; and each was substantially higher than that for vocal prosody. Accuracy for all three modalities together reached 88.93%, exceeding that for any single modality or pair of modalities. These findings suggest that automatic detection of depression from behavioral indicators is feasible and that multimodal measures afford most powerful detection.

In automatic emotional expression analysis, head motion has been considered mostly a nuisance variable, something to control when extracting features for action unit or expression detection. As an initial step toward understanding the contribution of head motion to emotion communication, we investigated the interpersonal coordination of rigid head motion in intimate couples with a history of interpersonal violence. Episodes of conflict and non-conflict were elicited in dyadic interaction tasks and validated using linguistic criteria. Head motion parameters were analyzed using Student’s paired t-tests; actor-partner analyses to model mutual influence within couples; and windowed cross-correlation to reveal dynamics of change in direction of influence over time. Partners’ RMS angular displacement for yaw and RMS angular velocity for pitch and yaw each demonstrated strong mutual influence between partners. Partners’ RMS angular displacement for pitch was higher during conflict. In both conflict and non-conflict, head angular displacement and angular velocity for pitch and yaw were strongly correlated, with frequent shifts in lead-lag relationships. The overall amount of coordination between partners’ head movement was more highly correlated during non-conflict compared with conflict interaction. While conflict increased head motion, it served to attenuate interpersonal coordination.