ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF FACIAL EXPRESSIONS DURING THE PRACTICE OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND MENTAL HEALTH

The Recreovía program (RP) promotes healthy habits and lifestyles through the practice of physical activity (PA) directed and musicalized in public spaces in Bogotá Colombia, with an average annual attendance of 800,000 participants. The objective of this study was to evaluate the changes in Emotional Facial Expression (EFE) during a PA session of the RP. The emotions evaluated were happiness, sadness, surprise, scary, disgust, and contempt, in addition, the neutral emotional state described by Ekman (1972). Methods. Descriptive cross-sectional study with 566 subjects aged 15 to 85 years (72.1% women and 27.9% men). The sample was estimated with a 95% confidence interval and a 5% margin of error. The facial expression analysis was performed with the FaceReader® facial recognition software and equipment. The data were analyzed through the techniques of Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal- Wallis with SPSS version 24 software. Results. The age ranges were distributed as follows: 15-30 (22.8%), 31-45 (49.6%), 46-60 (26.9%) and 61-85 (0.7%). Users placed their emotions like this, neutral 47%, happiness 20%, sadness 7%, angry 6%, surprise 3%, scary 4%, disgust 8% and contempt 1%. The differences by gender were found, sadness (women 8%, men 5%, p = 0.007) and angry (women 5%, men 7%, p = 0.040). In the comparison by age, differences were found between 15-30 years and 46-60 years (neutral 35%, 47%, p = 0.000; happiness 27%, 13% p = 0.001; scary 2%, 6% p = 0.016). Conclusions. Neutrality is an emotional state that shows no happiness or sadness. It is assumed that during this time learning processes predominate. The most evoked emotion during the AF session was happiness followed by sadness, emotion related to the ambiguities of the movements in the process of learning motor gestures and happiness corresponds to the achievement in the execution that generates adherence to the program Recreovía that contributes to the mental and social health of the participants.