ANXIETY - A Tricky
Emotion to Portray
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.