Visitors’ emotional expression in urban forest parks: What can we know about on-line facial images from the Social Networking Services?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology, Public Health, Biosphere Interactions, Forestry, Spatial and Geographic Information Science
- Keywords
- Ecosystem services, Stress restoration, Selfie, Emotion, Trees
- Copyright
- © 2017 Guan et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Visitors’ emotional expression in urban forest parks: What can we know about on-line facial images from the Social Networking Services? PeerJ Preprints 5:e3424v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3424v1
Abstract
Urban forests can attract visitors by the function of well-being improvement, which can be evaluated by analyzing the big-data from the social networking services (SNS). In this study, 935 facial images of visitors to nine urban forest parks were screened and downloaded from check-in records in the SNS platform of Sina Micro-Blog at cities of Changchun, Harbin, and Shenyang in Northeast China. Images were recognized for facial expressions by FaceReaderTM to read out eight emotional expressions: neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt. The number of images by women was larger than that by men. Compared to images from Changchun, those from Shenyang harbored higher neutral degree, which showed a positive relationship with the distance of forest park from downtown. In Changchun, the angry, surprised, and disgusted degrees decreased with the increase of distance of forest park from downtown, while the happy and disgusted degrees showed the same trend in Shenyang. In forest parks at city center and remote-rural areas, the neutral degree was positively correlated with the angry, surprised and contempt degrees but negatively correlated with the happy and disgusted degrees. In the sub-urban area the correlation of neutral with both surprised and disgusted degrees disappeared. Our study can be referred to by urban planning to evaluate the perceived well-being in urban forests through analyzing facial expressions of images from SNS.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.