Recognition of Emotions in Relation to 'Emotional Families'

The work is aimed at studying the performance of emotion recognition of people of different sex and age, expressed without specified criteria, in association with «emotional families». The materials of an empirical online research obtained with the help of the crowdsourcing service «Yandex. Toloka», in which 3,590 testers took part. The subjects guessed one of 14 emotions from the presented photographs (pride, anger, joy, irritation, fun, disgust, pleasure, sadness, relief, despair, interest, fear, surprise, anxiety). Photographs of five representatives of different age groups were presented: 7-9 years old («junior school student», 44 photos), 13-16 years old («teenager», 46 photos), 18-25 years old («young woman», 90 photos), 35 -50 years old («woman», 44 photos), 60 years and older («older woman», 70 photos). Subsequently, the experimenters compared the responses of the subjects with the criterion of matching the guessed emotion and its «emotional family» (according to P. Ekman). The main result is that the emotions were distributed by the subjects according to their orientation (valency) rather than according to the “family”. It remains debatable what could be the basis of such choices - the features of the stimulus material, or variability in the expression of emotions by models and their recognition by respondents.