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• years 80
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• years2000
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By analogy with the three heads antique chimera, the expression is said "chimerical" if it combines several typical expressions on the same face.

According to an idea of Monique de Bonis, specialist of the facial expressions and the emotion in the cognitive sciences, we began a research on faces composing two typical expressions. Emotional signals corresponding to different feelings could be crossed in a rigorous and systematic way.

Monique Nahas began to generate chimerical faces from 2D pictures. By using the database of expressions built by Paul Ekman, and with his agreement, several experiments were developped with diverse publications, in particular one in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences (Life Sciences) 322, 1-7, 1999. 322, 1-7, 1999.

Four presented images are constituted by two real expressions coming from the image basis of Eckman, (to the left in the picture), and by two chimerical expressions to the right where we see the crossing between the high and low parts of images . Without denying a remark of Ekman who found that certain realistic details were absent in the crossed images, it seemed to us that they presented a sufficient realism for justifying the validation of the psychological experiences corresponding to fast visions of the various faces.