Pathognomy

The science of pathognomy stands as a platform towards the practicality of identifying certain emotions, some of which may be more challenging to identify, such as subtle signs of disease to various psychological disorders. Psychological disorders include depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar personality disorder, eating disorders, Williams syndrome, schizophrenia, and autism spectrum disorders. Emotional recognition through facial expression seems to be the core focus of perception towards understanding the signs of emotions. Over the years, there has been a significant improvement as to how much one can detect emotional signals through non-verbal cues across a variety of databases, from what was based on human emotion recognition, to now a database on computers that provide the same stimuli to research this recognition of emotion further. == Methods used ==

Computer-based methods In 1978, Ekman and his colleague Wallace V. Friesen created a taxonomy of facial muscles and their actions, providing an objective measurement, whereby the system describes the facial behaviour being presented. This is known as the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Previous coding systems had a more subjective approach, only attempting to infer the underlying expressions, which heavily relied on an individual's perspective and judgement. The FACS mainly focuses on describing the facial expression being portrayed, but interpretation can later be added by the researcher where the facial behaviours closely relate to the emotional situation. A freely available database that was based on the FACS is Radboud Faces Database (RaFD). This data set contains Caucasian face images of "8 facial expressions, with three gaze directions, photographed simultaneously from five different camera angles". All RaFD emotions are perceived as clearly expressed, with contempt being the only emotion being less clear than others. through the exposure of stimuli that presents males and females, to adults and children, participants are asked to determine the emotion being expressed. Silvan S Tomkins and his protégés, Carol E. Izard and Paul Ekman they had presented audio stimuli on speakers and asked participants to match the audio to the corresponding emotion by choosing, on a printed sheet, a label illustrated with a photo depicting the facial expression. Chronaki et al. used a fully-computerised method to present the stimuli on headphones and ask participants to select amongst keyboard keys with emotional word labels printed on them. These many modes of research on vocal expression follow a standard method, presenting the stimulus and requesting the participant to provide a matching emotion towards what they have heard. This form can further increase the knowledge of emotions and passions through such non-verbal communications. ==See also==