Facial Expressions of Emotion

The results of a study on how emotions were expressed on human faces cross-culturally was published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. Researchers Srinivasan and Martinez studied which and how many cross-cultural and cultural-specific facial expressions people commonly use in real life and not just in a laboratory setting. Their conclusions were based from evaluating over 7 million images collected from 31 different countries. They found that of the 16,384 possible facial configurations that people can theoretically produce, only 35 are successfully used to transmit emotive information across cultures, and only 8 within a smaller number of cultures. They also found that the number of expressions used to communicate each emotion is also different. They identified one emotion that appears to be the most complex of all. More next time.