  This work defines a procedure for collecting naturally induced emotional
facial expressions through the vision of movie excerpts with high emotional
contents and reports experimental data ascertaining the effects of emotions on
memory word recognition tasks. The induced emotional states include the four
basic emotions of sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise, as well as the
neutral emotional state. The resulting database contains both thermal and
visible emotional facial expressions, portrayed by forty Italian subjects and
simultaneously acquired by appropriately synchronizing a thermal and a standard
visible camera. Each subject's recording session lasted 45 minutes, allowing
for each mode (thermal or visible) to collect a minimum of 2000 facial
expressions from which a minimum of 400 were selected as highly expressive of
each emotion category. The database is available to the scientific community
and can be obtained contacting one of the authors. For this pilot study, it was
found that emotions and/or emotion categories do not affect individual
performance on memory word recognition tasks and temperature changes in the
face or in some regions of it do not discriminate among emotional states.
