Facial Response to Video Content in Depression

Depressed subjects have been shown to respond differently to images of positive and negative content, when compared with non-depressed subjects. The underlying cause could be the impaired inhibition of negative affect, which has been found in depressed patients across several studies. We de-scribe the techniques used in an ongoing study to compare the clinical diagnosis of depression with automatically mea-sured facial activity and expressions. Video recordings are made of patients and control subjects watching a series of film clips, portraying negative and positive content. Subject-specific Active Appearance Models are built in order to ex-tract visual features from the faces within frames captured from the videos. The raw feature data is then used to mea-sure each participant‘s facial activity and to train Support Vector Machines for recognition of facial expressions. 1