What is the Child Affective Facial Expression Set (CAFE)?
For the past two years, I have been working on a the creation of a stimulus set of children making emotional facial expressions, for use in scientific studies. I am working on this project in collaboration with Vanessa LoBue, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who received her doctorate from UVa.
While there is a large amount of research examining the perception of emotional facial expressions, almost all of this research has focused on the perception of adult facial expressions. There are several excellent stimulus sets of adult facial expressions that can be easily obtained and used in scientific research (i.e., NimStim, Ekman faces). However, there is no complete stimulus set of child affective facial expressions, and thus research on the perception of children making affective facial expression is sparse. The Child Affective Facial Expressions Set (CAFE) is the first attempt to create a large and representative set of children making a variety of affective facial expressions that can be used for scientific research in this area. The set is made up of photographs of over 100 child models (ages 4-6) making 7 different facial expressions – happy, angry, sad, fearful, surprise, neutral, and disgust.
For more information, check out:
The post on our continuing need for subjects: Seeking ethnically diverse children to make faces for science!
The post regarding the art-science exhibit Child Face, in which an early series of photographs from the set were displayed: Child Face on display at McGuffey Art Center
Are you a researcher desiring to use the set? We are still in the process of creating and validating the set. Please send an email to childfaceset@gmail.com to get on the list of people to be notified when the set is ready for use in the greater research community.