Hidden Emotions in Iconic Faces

Most of the time, humans use texts to exchange information and more recently they can add iconic faces (or smiley) to introduce emotional content. What emotions can be conveyed by iconic faces? To understand better this question we conducted an experimentation in which we asked participants to interpret a set of iconic faces by selecting an emotion in a proposed list of faces. Results indicated that some unexpected emotions, such like deception or desire were identified on iconic faces. That is why we believe that the use of iconic faces can convey more emotions and consequently should improve human computer interaction. We proposed also to use machine learning techniques to recognize and classify emotions. We used a specific method to train a Support Vector Machine and we reached 67% of accuracy.