Contextual modulation of affect: Comparing humans and deep neural networks

When inferring emotions, humans rely on a number of cues, including not only facial expressions, body posture, but also expressor-external, contextual information. The goal of the present study was to compare the impact of such contextual information on emotion processing in humans and two deep neural network (DNN) models. We used results from a human experiment in which two types of pictures were rated for valence and arousal: the first type depicted people expressing an emotion in a social context including other people; the second was a context-reduced version in which all information except for the target expressor was blurred out. The resulting human ratings of valence and arousal were systematically decreased in the context-reduced version, highlighting the importance of context. We then compared human ratings with those of two DNN models (one trained on face images only, and the other trained also on contextual information). Analyses of both categorical and the valence/arousal ratings showed that although there were some superficial similarities, both models failed to capture human rating patterns both in context-rich and context-reduced conditions. Our study emphasizes the importance of a more holistic, multi-modal training regime with richer human data to build better emotion-understanding systems in the area of affective computing.