1. The Face of Populism: Examining Differences in Facial Emotional Expressions of Political Leaders Using Machine Learning
- Author
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Major, Sara and Tomašević, Aleksandar
- Subjects
Computer Science - Computers and Society ,Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition ,Computer Science - Machine Learning ,Computer Science - Social and Information Networks ,Physics - Physics and Society ,J.4 - Abstract
Populist rhetoric employed on online media is characterized as deeply impassioned and often imbued with strong emotions. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the differences in affective nonverbal communication of political leaders. We use a deep-learning approach to process a sample of 220 YouTube videos of political leaders from 15 different countries, analyze their facial expressions of emotion and then examine differences in average emotion scores representing the relative presence of 6 emotional states (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and a neutral expression for each frame of the YouTube video. Based on a sample of manually coded images, we find that this deep-learning approach has 53-60\% agreement with human labels. We observe statistically significant differences in the average score of negative emotions between groups of leaders with varying degrees of populist rhetoric., Comment: Version 4.0: Annotation study added, supplementary information extended
- Published
- 2023