P ortrayals : A corpus for the study of multimodal emotional expressions

This paper introduces the GEMEP (GenevaMultimodal Emotion Portrayals) corpus, a new repository of portrayed emotional expressions. Corpora of acted portrayals tend to include portrayals of very intense emotions, which are considered to occur infrequently in daily interactions between humans or between humans and machines. Acted portrayals have therefore been challenged as unsuited for applied research purposes. Taking a different stance, we argue that: (a) portrayals produced by appropriately instructed actors are analogue to expressions that do occur in selected reallife contexts; (b) acted portrayals – as opposed to induced or real-life sampled emotional expressions – display the most expressive variability and therefore constitute excellent material for the systematic study of nonverbal communication of emotions. We describe the guidelines used to record the corpus and some of our short-term research plans with the corpus.