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A few comments on the 2008 NimStim database (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3474329/pdf/nihms408635.pdf), a large and racially diverse reference database for face- and emotion-recognition tasks

Facial expressions for ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘fearful’, ‘surprised’, ‘disgusted’, ‘neutral’ and ‘calm’ are represented, with open- and closed-mouth variants for all but ‘surprised’, and an additional ‘exuberant’ variant for ‘happy’

The face stimuli themselves are posed photographs of 42* professional actors from New York City, 18 female and 25 male, aged 21–30

Twenty-five of those actors were European-American, 10 African-American, 6 Asian-American and two Latinx-American – but there was a deliberate decision to focus on the US (and specifically New York) to minimise effects of inter-cultural variation

(I was somewhat surprised to see a paper from just 15 years ago uncritically using the racially motivated terms ‘Caucasian’ and ‘sub-Saharan Africa’, even if these were in reference to earlier papers that may have used these terms)

*originally 43, but one actor didn’t meet validation thresholds

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