Valence shows the ‘goodness’ of someone’s emotional reaction. For example, a positive valence would suggest a positive emotion, such as happiness, while a negative valence might indicate an emotion like fear or disgust.

How the science works...

Our model is trained on data that has been annotated by experts. I.e., the experts have examined peoples' expressions and mapped it to a valence measurement that we then use to train our models. Valence makes up part of the arousal valence model, with arousal (expression) describing the strength of the emotional reaction.