Judgments of Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion across Cultures and Languages

Abstract

The claim that certain emotions are universally recognized from facial expressions is based primarily on the study of expressions that were posed. The current study was of spontaneous facial expressions shown by aborigines in Papua New Guinea (Ekman, 1980) -- 18 faces claimed to convey one (or, in the case of blends, two) basic emotions and four faces claimed to show other universal feelings. For each face, ten samples of observers-- South Koreans speaking Korean (n=66), Spaniards speaking Spanish (n=54), Israelis speaking Hebrew (n=60), Chinese speaking English (n=83), Chinese speaking Cantonese (n=64), Japanese speaking English (n=71), Japanese speaking Japanese (n=72), Indians speaking English (n=65), Indians speaking Kannada (n=62), and Indians speaking Hindi (n=120)--rated the degree to which each of the 12 predicted emotions or feelings was conveyed. The modal choice across all ten samples of observers was the predicted label for only 2 (of the 22) faces, predicted to convey exclusively happiness. Observers endorsed the predicted emotion or feeling moderately often (mean=56%), but also denied it moderately often (mean=44%). They also endorsed more than one (or, for blends, two) label(s) in each face - on average, 1.8 of basic emotions and 3.7 of other feelings. There were both similarities and differences across culture and language, but the emotional meaning of a facial expression is not well captured by the predicted label(s) or, indeed, by any single label.