ANXIETY - A Tricky
Emotion to Portray
 Figure 1. NYTimes illustration |  Figure 2. Author's illustration |
The young woman in Figure 1 is pretty darned afraid, but not quite enough.
Fear is the most difficult emotion to portray, both by actors and artists. It can be confused with surprise, sadness, and disgust. In tests I did with researchers at the University of Washington, it took us literally hundreds of attempts to create animated characters with fear faces that could get 90% agreement using internet-based Mechanical Turk responses, and the examples that worked were extreme versions of terror, with bulging eyes and a radically widened mouth.
More subtle fear, “Anxiety” -- which is what the New York Times illustration by Mickey Duzyj (Figure 1) intends to convey -- is even more tricky to portray in a way that gets as high a consensus. This excellent drawing uses every feature effectively. The eyebrows are stressed and slightly raised, the eyes are extra-wide, and the mouth is opened and slightly stretched. However, using Mechanical Turk, the MT score I got is 74%, good but not great. 18% of the respondents thought she looked disgusted, 6% surprised.
I decided to try improving on the MT result by making the mouth much more obviously stressed and stretched (Figure 2), basically eliminating the upper lip (the most important signal for disgust), hiding the upper teeth (not visible in fear, but very clear in disgust), and stretching the mouth, particularly the lower lip. My version received a 90% MT score, a really strong result for a less-than-all-out expression of "fear," with the reading of "disgust" and "surprise" basically eliminated.
More subtle fear, “Anxiety” -- which is what the New York Times illustration by Mickey Duzyj (Figure 1) intends to convey -- is even more tricky to portray in a way that gets as high a consensus. This excellent drawing uses every feature effectively. The eyebrows are stressed and slightly raised, the eyes are extra-wide, and the mouth is opened and slightly stretched. However, using Mechanical Turk, the MT score I got is 74%, good but not great. 18% of the respondents thought she looked disgusted, 6% surprised.
I decided to try improving on the MT result by making the mouth much more obviously stressed and stretched (Figure 2), basically eliminating the upper lip (the most important signal for disgust), hiding the upper teeth (not visible in fear, but very clear in disgust), and stretching the mouth, particularly the lower lip. My version received a 90% MT score, a really strong result for a less-than-all-out expression of "fear," with the reading of "disgust" and "surprise" basically eliminated.
Credits: (top left) Illustration by Mickey Duzyj for NY Times Magazine article, "Understanding the Anxious Mind" by Robin Marantz Henig, September 29, 2009. (top right) Modified illustration by blog author.
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