Applying FaceReader to Recognize Consumer Emotions in Graphic Styles

Products reinforcing positive consumer emotions can promote purchasing desire. The following emotional effects also can influence consumers' recognition and feelings. In design field, understanding consumer emotions and the reasons behind can help designers establish emotional communication between consumer and product, and create consumer demands. This study elaborated various relations between emotion and graphic style. We conducted an emotion recognition experiment to understand participants' emotional reactions toward graphics with four levels of stylization. FaceReader, an automatic facial expression recognition software, was used to recognize 120 participants' emotions by one-way repeated measures ANOVA. Meanwhile, emotional adjectives and self-reports from participants were compared with those aroused emotions from viewing stylized graphics. The results indicated (1) participants showed significant emotional differences in happiness, anger, surprise and disgust toward different levels of stylized graphics. (2) Graphics with a simple element and sharp edge could attract participants' attention. (3) Realistic graphics could inspire more associate ideas from participants. (4) Participants had higher positive evaluations on colorful graphics, and graphics with single color can attract their attention. Furthermore, we generalized limitations and precautions in applying FaceReader: (1) interpreting participants' emotions toward static images might result in lower statistical values of negative emotions. (2) When participants concentrated on the images, their facial expressions could be interpreted as angry emotion. (3) The neutral facial expression could be interpreted as sad emotion. (4) Participants' self-reports were supplementary to explain the plausibility of generated emotions from FaceReader. This research has demonstrated practical implications of graphic style. FaceReader could be an effective tool to evaluate consumer emotion in the field of design research. Furthermore, the importance and practicality of using facial expression recognition to evaluate participants' emotions in response to different graphic styles have been confirmed. This approach provides a preferable basis in relevant fields of design practice and marketing.