Facial Expressions of Visitors in Forests along the Urbanization Gradient: What Can We Learn from Selfies on Social Networking Services?

Abstract

People’s satisfaction towards the experience in forests is one of most important feedbacks that forest park managers need to meet positive visitors’ experiences. Although the drawbacks of questionnaire methodology are obvious for data collection from self-reported scores at the landscape scale, few alternative methods have been proposed. In this study, nine urban forest parks along the urbanization gradients in three capital cities of Northeast China were targeted to investigate their visitors’ selfies from social networking services (SNS) by assessing facial expressions. A total of 935 photos with location records were obtained from the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog in a social hot-event of ‘Golden Week Holidays of National Day of China’ of 2017. Images were recognized by FireFace software to assess scores of neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt expressions. Data were ranked in descending order and analyzed by Friedman’s test, correlation analysis, and Poisson regression. Visitors in downtown-forests showed fewer negative expressions at the most northern city than at the southern most one. The negative expressions tended to be alleviated with the increasing distance of forest parks from downtown. However, when the distance reached over 10 km no geographical effect was found. Female visitors showed positive emotional expressions to urban forests while male visitors showed no response. In conclusion, using data from SNS, this study found an experience in forest park less than 10 km from the downtown of a northern city resulted in female visitors showing the most positive expressions.

The Relationship between the Facial Expression of People in University Campus and Host-City Variables

“…The Sina Micro-Blog (SMB; Sina Inc., Beijing, China) was chosen as the platform of SNS to collect facial photos using the method of Wei et al [19]. SMB is widely used by Chinese web-users and functions similar to Twitter (NYSE: TWTR, San Francisco, CA, USA) that supplies a platform to pose real-time mini-blogs to the internet with comments and images (photos).…”

“…Traditionally, questionnaires provided a common method to evaluate people perception. Evaluation through self-reported scores has several apparent biases from subjective emotion of respondents, real-time mood, problematic questions, and social-role restricted results [19]. Facial expression represents an emotional response to a stimulus and/or a communicative behavior in a social situation, which can be termed as Duchenne (a felt expression with an emotion cue) and non-Duchenne ways (an unfelt expression with a communicative cue), respectively [20].…”

Feeling Stressed and Ugly? Leave the City and Visit Nature! An Experiment on Self- and Other-Perceived Stress and Attractiveness Levels

“…The first evidence comes from two recent studies from China. In one study, selfies uploaded in social media were related to the location at which the picture was taken [ 50 ]. This study indicated that software-measured facial expressions, especially from women, vary with the distance to the city center.…”

The Accuracy Validation of FireFACE Software in Analyzing Facial Expressions of Urban Forest Visitors

“…The perception to infrastructure and openness are determinants of the emotional variation at different places [17,18]. When urban forests at different places were focused, people will also show spatial variation of emotional expressions that resulted from the perception to environmental factors [19,20]. Again, the validation of the instrument for facial expression recognition is lacking to the best of our knowledge.…”

“…FireFACE ver. 3.0 has been used to detect the combined effects of geographical variation across urbanization gradient on facial expressions of urban forests in Northeast China [19]. Therefore, FireFACE has the desired precision in facial analysis for people in urban forests although mostly they tended to show subtle expressions.…”