The Mystery of Facial Expressions

What they mean around the world

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Here is a Research Paper, with the results explained in plain language (i.e. Plainly Put).

The official name of the research : Deep learning reveals what facial expressions mean to people in different cultures

Here’s what the researchers were saying:

• We wanted to understand how people express emotions with their faces, and if it’s the same or different across different countries.
• To do this, we gathered a ton of information from over 5,800 people in six different countries.
• People looked at pictures and made faces based on how they felt, and then told us what emotions those faces represented.

What we found

• We discovered that there are a bunch of different ways people express emotions with their faces, like smiling, frowning, or looking surprised.
• We used computers to help us figure out if these expressions mean the same thing in different countries.
• Turns out, most of the time, people across different places see facial expressions in similar ways.

The data collected

• We collected a huge amount of data from people making facial expressions, totaling over 423,000 expressions!
• People rated these expressions in their own language, telling us what emotions they thought each expression showed.
• Then, we used fancy computer programs called deep neural networks to analyze all this information and find patterns.

What it all means

• By looking at all this data, we found out that there are 28 different ways people express emotions with their faces.
• And get this, 21 of these ways are pretty much the same across different cultures! This means people all over the world understand certain facial expressions in similar ways.

Putting it all together

• We figured out a lot about how people show emotions with their faces, and we learned that there’s a lot of similarity in how we understand these expressions, no matter where we’re from.

When we figured it out

• Our findings were accepted and published on February 6, 2024.
• We started working on this research back in July 2023, and it took us until September 2023 to revise and make it better.

Sources:

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) |

ScienceDirect

Access this article on ScienceDirect

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.109175