The Caucasian and North African French Faces (CaNAFF): A Face Database

Abstract

In France, when studying intergroup relations between ethnicities, one usually contrasts Caucasian and North African individuals. Despite the presence of a large number of face databases in the literature, none of them contains Caucasian and North African faces similar to faces we can find in a usual French environment. To overcome this problem, we propose a new database: the Caucasian and North African French Faces (CaNAFF). One hundred and forty-seven individuals, scattered on prototypicality across the Caucasian/North African continuum, have been photographed. These individuals displayed a neutral emotional expression and photos were taken under three eye gaze directions (right, frontal, and left), resulting in a total of 441 photos. Subsequently, in order to validate our database, 25 participants evaluated the photos on emotional neutrality and 30 participants evaluated faces on ethnic prototypicality, attractiveness, and willingness to approach/avoid faces. We make available to researchers this database as well as the result of the validation as a support for studying relations between Caucasian and North African individuals in France. The procedure for requesting access to the CaNAFF database as well as the validation file are available on this following link: https://osf.io/274ry/.

Keywords

• face database
• intergroup relations
• North African
• Caucasian
• prototypicality