Universal Emotions

 Paul Ekman is well-known in psychological research as he contributed a lot to understanding human emotions. In 1960 together with Wallace Friesen studied the isolated
culture of the Fore people living in Papua New Guinea. The sample consisted of 189 adults and
130 children of both genders. Researchers proposed the six universal emotions and the micro-expressions.

Six universal emotions include happiness, fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and disgust.
According to Ekman and Friesen (1960) humans use cues for emotion indication. Motion cues
for happiness are raised or lowered mouth corners, eyes opened wide and a slight jaw drop
indicates surprise, sadness is indicated by lowering of mouth corners and raised inner brow
corners, raised brows and open eyes are cues for fear, disgust is expressed by wrinkled nose
bridge and raised cheeks, bulging eyes and firmly pressed lips are cues for anger.
Microexpressions are very short facial expressions that only last between 1/15- 1/25
seconds. According to Ekman and Friesen, it happens when repression occurs, when people hide
their feeling from others. They also proposed that normal facial expressions (Macro expressions)
often repeat and last about ½ - 4 seconds and distinguished other types of expressions, false
expressions that are not emotionally felt, and masked expressions with intentions to hide macro
expressions.

These findings suggest that facial emotions are innate and can occur involuntarily in

expression and physiology (Ekman, 1994). However, Markus and Kitayma (1991) proposed

cultural differences in emotion recognition. A study by O’Toole et al (1996) found that

individuals more accurately identify same-race faces than other-race faces. In addition, A study

by Liua et al (2015) in a study using EEG found that English-speaking North Americans read

emotions from facial expressions and Chinese speaking Mandarin depend on voices of others. Li

(2013) suggested that individuals from individualistic cultures are more accurate at recognizing

negative facial emotions than individuals from collectivist cultures. A study by Jack et al (2009)

found the perceptual disparity between East Asians and Western Caucasians, challenging the

concept of universal facial emotion expressions.

Rasa Ramanauske

Recognition of Emotions from Facial Expressions: the role of gender, age, personality, and empathy, 2016