Head Orientation of Public Speakers: Variation with Emotion, Profession and Age

The orientation of head is known to be a conduit of emotions or in intensifying or in toning down emotion expressed by face. We present a multimodal study of 162 videos comprising speeches of three professionals: politicians, CEOs and their spokespersons. We investigate the relationship of the three Euler angles (yaw, pitch, roll) that characterise the orientation with emotions, using two well known facial emotion expression recognition system. The two systems (Emotient and Affectiva) give similar outputs for the Euler angles. However, the variation of the Euler angles with a given discrete emotion is different for the two systems given the same input. The gender of the person displaying a given emotion plays a key role in distinguishing the output of the two systems: consequently it appears that correlation of the Euler angles is system dependent as well. We have introduced a combined vector which is the sum of the magnitude of the three Euler angles per frame.