Constitutive meeting of the CNSR Advisory Board 

On 21 March, the Advisory Board of the CNSR met for its constitutive meeting.
Members of the board are:

•     Prof. Dr. Silke Hertel (Institute of Educational Sciences and spokesperson of FoF4)
•     Prof. Dr. Dirk Hagemann (Psychological Institute)
•     Prof. Dr. Andreas Voß (Psychological Institute)
•     Dr. Martin Stoffel (Medical Psychology)
•     Dr. Philipp Wanner (Institute of Sport and Sport Sciences)
•     Dr. Torsten Wüstenberg (CNSR)

The work of the Board is coordinated by Dr. Torsten Wüstenberg. Its purpose is to support the management of the CNSR and FoF4 in ensuring the scientific quality of the studies conducted in the CNSR and to advise on strategic decisions. In this sense, all study outlines submitted to the CNSR are reviewed by the Board members and future large-scale equipment orders are assessed with regard to their benefit.

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Show me your emotions 

Since the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" in 1872, generations of scientists have used facial expressions as a proxy for a person's emotional status. At this time, researchers had only their individual observational skills available to them for the study and interpretation of mimic activity. The methodological spectrum for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of such effects has broadened enormously in the last 150 years. Today, in addition to EMG for measuring facial muscle activity, video-based methods are also available that are able to classify facial expressions and assign them to specific emotions with the help of machine learning. The CNSR has also recently been provided with such a system by the company Noldus, which makes it possible to differentiate between happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust in videos and photos with a high classification quality (Dupré et al., 2020).

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