  Emotion recognition has received considerable attention from the Computer
Vision community in the last 20 years. However, most of the research focused on
analyzing the six basic emotions (e.g. joy, anger, surprise), with a limited
work directed to other affective states. In this paper, we tackle
sentimentality (strong feeling of heartwarming or nostalgia), a new emotional
state that has few works in the literature, and no guideline defining its
facial markers. To this end, we first collect a dataset of 4.9K videos of
participants watching some sentimental and non-sentimental ads, and then we
label the moments evoking sentimentality in the ads. Second, we use the
ad-level labels and the facial Action Units (AUs) activation across different
frames for defining some weak frame-level sentimentality labels. Third, we
train a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) using the AUs activation for sentimentality
detection. Finally, we define two new ad-level metrics for evaluating our model
performance. Quantitative and qualitative results show promising results for
sentimentality detection. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work
to address the problem of sentimentality detection.
