ArticleBehavior research methods2022
A systematic survey of face stimuli used in psychological research 2000-2020.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Interactions between faces and visual context in emotion perception: A meta-analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- Creating and validating photorealistic AI-generated facial expression stimuli for emotion research.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Does artificiality matter? Comparing working memory performance for artificial and real faces.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Neural signatures of hyper-realistic AI-generated faces: dissociating behavioral indistinguishability from implicit neural evaluation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Dynamic multimodal expressions support inference of both presence and relative salience of blended emotions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Right-hemisphere lateralisation evidenced from the chimeric face task predicts self-reported social competencies.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Introducing the Naturalistic Expression Labeling Task (NELT): Associations with posed expression labeling, empathy, and general cognitive ability.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Shades of smiles: creating variants of smiles from neutral images of real individuals - method and validation.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Faking It Isn't Making It: Research Needs Spontaneous and Naturalistic Facial Expressions.Affective science · 2026Article
- Article
- Facially Expressive People are More Popular in Newly Formed Groups: A Social Network Analysis.Journal of nonverbal behavior · 2026Article
- Evaluating the performance of general purpose large language models in identifying human facial emotions.NPJ digital medicine · 2025Article
- Recognition of Authentic Happy and Sad Facial Expressions in Chinese Elementary School Children: Evidence from Behavioral and Eye-Movement Studies.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- A Review of 25 Spontaneous and Dynamic Facial Expression Databases of Basic Emotions.Affective science · 2025Review
- Non-verbal effecting - animal research sheds light on human emotion communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- The Beyond Reality Image Collection (BRIC).Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Testing the Ingroup Advantage in Emotion Perception from Dynamic Posed and Spontaneous Expressions.Journal of nonverbal behavior · 2025Article
- Electrophysiological and behavioural responses to consonant and dissonant piano chords as standardised affective stimuli.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Establishing construct validity for dynamic measures of behavior using naturalistic study designs.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Can deepfakes be used to study emotion perception? A comparison of dynamic face stimuli.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For decades, psychology has relied on highly standardized images to understand how people respond to faces. Many of these stimuli are rigorously generated and supported by excellent normative data; as such, they have played an important role in the development of face science. However, there is now clear evidence that testing with ambient images (i.e., naturalistic images "in the wild") and including expressions that are spontaneous can lead to new and important insights. To precisely quantify the extent to which our current knowledge base has relied on standardized and posed stimuli, we systematically surveyed the face stimuli used in 12 key journals in this field across 2000-2020 (N = 3374 articles). Although a small number of posed expression databases continue to dominate the literature, the use of spontaneous expressions seems to be increasing. However, there has been no increase in the use of ambient or dynamic stimuli over time. The vast majority of articles have used highly standardized and nonmoving pictures of faces. An emerging trend is that virtual faces are being used as stand-ins for human faces in research. Overall, the results of the present survey highlight that there has been a significant imbalance in favor of standardized face stimuli. We argue that psychology would benefit from a more balanced approach because ambient and spontaneous stimuli have much to offer. We advocate a cognitive ethological approach that involves studying face processing in natural settings as well as the lab, incorporating more stimuli from "the wild".
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Registered trials
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