Universality of Facial Expressions of Emotions
Already Darwin in his well known publication The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals from 1872 said that our face is the most important organ of emotion expression.
And he was right, again.
Later, Paul Ekman, American psychologist, studied emotions and their facial expressions for decades. According to him, emotions are not hidden, they are observable. We can observe signs of emotions in our breath, heart rate, brain activity, in many nonverbal cues and between them also in facial expressions.
Meaning of facial behavior in emotional context is really significant. Emotions are important because they are involuntary.
Facial expressions of certain emotions are even universal all over the world. Ekman calls these emotions basic. This group includes anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. All these emotions point to fundamental life tasks that we are dealing with in ways which are rooted in our evolutionary past as adaptive.
The universality of emotional expressions was examined by many variations of emotion recognition task. Photographs with facial expressions of emotions were shown to people from different cultures. They should associate facial expressions to emotional state in the form of short story of emotion evoking situation or to the world that names emotion.
The best known research focused on emotions universality has taken place on Papua New Guinea. Ekman worked with indigenous people on emotion recognition task. They were not affected by the surrounding world and media, that´s why he choose them. The researcher told the Guinea´s inhabitant short story that was supposed to induce an emotion. Than Guinean choose the photo of facial expression of emotion which according to him belongs to this story. In another part of this research Guinean should create spontaneous facial expression after hearing emotion evocative story. Ekman recorded these expressions and then back in US show recordings to the Americans.
There was many similar researches whose results indicate that people from different cultures recognize facial expressions of basic emotions.
In meta-analysis of 87 articles using emotion recognition task Hillary Anger Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady in 2002 concluded that there is evidence of universality of some core components of emotions which are likely biological.
Another research from Barbara Montagne and her colleagues show us some specificities of emotion recognition task in videos (emotion raises from neutral face). As anticipated, expression of happiness was the easiest to recognize while fear was the more difficult. Research also proposed differences between younger and older people in emotion recognition in general. It was more difficult for elderly to recognize expression of anger, fear, happiness and sadness.
Ekman proposed these nine important characteristics of basic emotions, including facial expressions at several points:
I. distinctive universal signals
II. presence in other primates
III. distinctive physiology
IV. distinctive universals in antecedent events
V. coherence among emotional response
VI. quick onset
VII. brief duration
VIII. automatic appraisal
IX. unbidden occurrence
Emotions have multiple ways of manifestation. Facial expressions, as one of them, communicate our emotions and action tendencies. They are part of adaptive reactions to our fundamental life tasks, created during the evolution. Although facial expressions of emotions may be individually distinguishable, 6 basic expressions are recognizable worldwide.
