The NIMH Child Emotional Faces Picture Set (NIMH‐ChEFS): a new set of children's facial emotion stimuli

Abstract

With emergence of new technologies, there has been an explosion of basic and clinical research on the affective and cognitive neuroscience of face processing and emotion perception. Adult emotional face stimuli are commonly used in these studies. For developmental research, there is a need for a validated set of child emotional faces. This paper describes the development of the NIMH Child Emotional Faces Picture Set (NIMH-ChEFS), a relatively large stimulus set with high quality, color images of the emotional faces of children. The set includes 482 photos of fearful, angry, happy, sad and neutral child faces with two gaze conditions: direct and averted gaze. In this paper we describe the development of the NIMH-ChEFS and data on the set's validity based on ratings by 20 healthy adult raters. Agreement between the a priori emotion designation and the raters' labels was high and comparable with values reported for commonly used adult picture sets. Intensity, representativeness, and composite "goodness" ratings are also presented to guide researchers in their choice of specific stimuli for their studies. These data should give researchers confidence in the NIMH-ChEFS's validity for use in affective and social neuroscience research.

The neurocognitive correlates of academic diligence in adolescent girls

“…Face stimuli in Figure 1B are shown here schematically only. Face stimuli for the actual task were photographs of real faces obtained from the NIMH-ChEFS adolescent face stimulus set (Egger et al, 2011).…”

The stimuli drive the response: An fMRI study of youth processing adult or child emotional face stimuli

“…Adult faces from the Ekman Pictures of Facial Affect series (Ekman and Friesen, 1976) and child faces from the newly developed and validated National Institute of Mental Health Child Emotional Faces Pictures Set (NIMH-ChEFS; Egger et al, 2011) were used. Importantly, the NIMH-ChEFS child face set shows high agreement and is comparable with values reported for commonly used adult picture sets, including the Ekman Pictures of Facial Affect (Egger et al, 2011). Additionally, actors for the NIMH-ChEFS emotional face stimuli ranged in age from 10 to 17 years with a mean age of 13.6 years old (Egger et al, 2011).…”

“…1B and 2A) and the other with newly validated child emotional faces ( Fig. 2B; Egger et al, 2011), in which actors used in stimuli closely match the ages of our participants. We examined the following hypotheses: (1) that the same basic neural systems underlie processing of adult and peer faces, (2) that magnitude and extent of response in face processing brain regions will vary between child and adult face stimuli, and (3) that the profile of amygdala response will differ across emotional valences of peer and adult faces.…”

The Pizzagame: A virtual public goods game to assess cooperative behavior in children and adolescents

“…This deception procedure draws on previous work using a similar strategy for the well-validated ballgame Cyberball (Crowley et al, 2010). To enhance the credibility of the cover story and minimize the impact of the subjects' inferences based on the different facial expressions of co-players, we used pictures from two emotional face databases of children with facial expressions confirmed as being neutral (Egger et al, 2011;Langner et al, 2010). To consolidate the impression that subjects were playing with three sets of two sameage, same-sex co-players, we used facial portraits of boys or girls 9 to 12 years of age for the younger subjects, and pictures of boys or girls 13 to 16 years of age for the older subjects.…”