Facial Expressions: Basic Emotions Theory

The above activity demonstrates a methodological approach used by Paul Ekman and colleagues (Ekman himself is in photo 2). Across many cultures, Ekman has found that participants can match each emotion to the correct facial expression at beyond chance levels. These findings have been replicated in Western and Eastern cultures. To Ekman, these findings demonstrated that basic emotions are universally identified by people of all cultures. In turn, this universal identification of facial expression suggests that all people in all cultures express emotions in the same way.

 

 

But, it could be possible that people in Western and Eastern cultures learn to show these same facial expressions, especially due to the greater flexibility with traveling in the 20^th century and exposure to media. So, Ekman decided to recruit participants from small tribes who have had little exposure to other cultures. He replicated his work with members of the Fore Tribe in Papua New Guinea and the Sadong group from Borneo. In Ekman’s classic study (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969) participants selected one word from a list of six emotions words that matched the facial expression in 30 different still photos. Each photo was displayed one at a time for 20 seconds. The photos displayed posed facial expressions for 1 of 6 emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust-contempt, and sadness. These labels were translated into appropriate languages. Some of the isolated cultures did not have words for disgust or surprise, so these participants were given an example that would elicit the emotion (“looking at something that stinks” for disgust, and “looking at something new” for surprise, p. 87). The individuals in the included photos were Caucasian males and females and included children and adults, actors, non-actors, college students, and individuals diagnosed with mental illnesses. Participants were from the United States, Brazil, Japan, Papua New Guinea, and Borneo. Table 3 displays the percentage of each sample who correctly identified the facial expression in the still photo. A majority of the participants from industrialized countries (USA, Brazil, Japan) correctly identified the facial expressions for all 6 emotions. The highest recognition rates were for happiness and the lowest were for anger and sadness (depending on the country). Participants living in isolated cultures showed high recognition rates for happiness and the majority of participants correctly identified sadness and anger, although these percentages were much smaller compared to the samples from the industrialized countries. Ekman and colleagues suggested the preliterate cultures showed lower recognition rates due to language barriers and a lack of experience completing similar tasks.

Table 3

Recognition Rates for Six Emotions Across Five Cultures

A table showing cross-cultural rates of recognition for a variety of emotion words. 

Emotion Displayed on Face	United States	Brazil	Japan	Fore Tribe of New Guinea – Pidgin Language	Fore Tribe of New Guinea – Fore Language	Sadong Tribe of Borneo
Happy (H)	97 H	97 H	87 H	99 H	82 H	92 H
Fear (F)	88 F	77 F	71 F 26 Su	46 F 31 A	54 F 25 A	40 F 33 Su
Disgust-contempt (D)	82 D	86 D	82 D	29 D 23 A	44 D 30 A	26 Sa 23 H
Anger (A)	69 A 29 D	82 A	63 A 14 D	56 A 22 F	50 A 25 F	64 A
Surprise (Su)	91 Su	82 Su	87 Su	38 Su 30 F	45 F 19 A	36 Su 23 F
Sadness (Sa)	73 Sa	82 Sa	74 Sa	55 Sa 23 A	56 A	52 Sa

Reproduced from “Pan-cultural Elements in Facial Displays of Emotion,” by P. Ekman, E.R. E.R. Sorenson, and W.V. Friesen, 1969, Science, 164(3875), p. 87, (https://doi: 10.1126/science.164.3875.86). Copyright  Note.  For the Fore tribe, some words were in Pidgin language, others in Fore language.

In a later study (Ekman & Friesen, 1971), Fore tribe participants (adults and children) were told a story (see Table 4) and then shown a set of three faces. Participants were then asked to select the face that matched the emotion described in the story.  Table 4 and Table 5 display results from adult and child participants, respectively. The majority of adult participants selected the correct photos for all six emotions. Yet, participants experienced some difficulty discriminating fear among faces showing surprise and happiness and surprise and sadness.  Children seemed to actually do better than adults!  Ekman and Friesen (1971) changed the methodology from prior studies because it was possible that isolated tribes might recognize facial expressions in Caucasians due to exposure to media and film from the Westernized world.  Thus, these results provide support for basic emotion theory. In addition, the overwhelming recognition rates demonstrated by children further supports evolutionary theory – which suggests emotions are biological adaptations and thus should be expressed in young children.

Table 4

Emotion Stories from Ekman and Friesen (1971)

Correct Facial Expression	Emotional Story
Happiness	His (her) friends have come and he (she) is happy.
Sadness	His (her) child (mother) has died, and he (she) feels very sad.
Anger	He (she) is angry; or he (she) is angry, about to fight.
Surprise	He (she) is just now looking at something new and unexpected.
Disgust	He (she) is looking at something he (she) dislikes; or He (she) is looking at something which smells bad.
Fear	He (she) is sitting in his (her) house all alone, and there is no one else in the village. There is no knife, axe, or bow and arrow in the house. A widl pig is standing in the door of the house and the man (women)is looking at the pig and is very afraid of it.  The pig has been standing in the doorway for a few minutes, and the person is looking at it very afraid and the pig won’t move away from the door, and he (she) is afraid the pig will bite him (her).

Adapted from “Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,” by P. Ekman, E.R. and W.V. Friesen, 1971, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), p. 126, (https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030377). Copyright 2016 by the American Psychological Association.

The tables listed below have an emotion that is described in the story listed above them.

Table 5

Results for Adult Participants (Ekman & Friesen, 1971)

Happiness Story

Emotion Shown in the three photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Happiness, Surprise, disgust	62	90%
Happiness, Surprise, sadness	57	93%
Happiness, Fear, anger	63	86%
Happiness, Disgust, anger	36	100%

Anger Story

Emotion Shown in the three photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Anger, Sadness, surprise	66	82%
Anger, Disgust, surprise	31	87%
Anger, Fear, sadness	31	87%

Sadness Story

Emotion Shown in the three photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Anger, fear	64	81%
Anger, surprise	26	81%
Anger, happiness	31	87%
Anger, disgust	35	69%
Disgust, surprise	35	77%

Disgust (smell story) 

Emotion Shown in the three photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Disgust, Sadness, surprise	65	77%

Disgust (Dislike story) 

Emotion Shown in three photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Disgust, Sadness, surprise	36	89%

Surprise Story

Emotion Shown in three photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Surprise, Fear, disgust	31	71%
Surprise, Happiness, anger	31	65%

 
Fear Story

Emotion Shown in the two incorrect photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Fear, Anger, disgust	92	64%
Fear, Sadness, disgust	31	87%
Fear, Anger, happiness	35	86%
Fear, Disgust, happiness	26	85%
Fear, Surprise, happiness	65	48%
Fear, Surprise, disgust	31	52%
Fear, Surprise, sadness	57	28%

 

Table 6

Results for Child Participants (Ekman & Friesen, 1971)

Happiness Story

Emotion Shown in the two photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Happiness, Surprise	116	87%
Happiness, Sadness	23	96%
Happiness, Anger	25	100%
Happiness, Disgust	25	88%

Anger Story

Emotion Shown in the two photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Anger, Sadness	69	90%

Sadness Story

Emotion Shown in two photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Sadness, Anger	60	85%
Sadness, Surprise	33	76%
Sadness, Disgust	27	89%
Sadness, Fear	25	76%

Disgust (smell story) 

Emotion Shown in two photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Disgust, Sadness	19	95%

Disgust (dislike story) 

Emotion Shown in two photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Disgust, Sadness	27	78%

Surprise Story

Emotion Shown in two photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Surprise, Happiness	14	100%
Surprise, Disgust	14	100%
Surprise, Fear	19	95%

Fear Story

Emotion Shown in two photographs	# Participants	% Choosing correct face
Fear, Sadness	25	92%
Fear, Anger	25	88%
Fear, Disgust	14	100%

Reproduced from “Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,” by P. Ekman, E.R. and W.V. Friesen, 1971, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), p. 127, (https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030377). Copyright 2016 by the American Psychological Association.

In a third attempt to replicate his basic emotion findings, Ekman and colleagues (1987) recruited participants from 10 cultures: Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Scotland, Mingangkabu in Sumatra, Turkey, and the United States. Similar to prior studies, participants were instructed to match emotion words in their language to facial expressions. In this study, facial expressions were photos of posed expressions, spontaneous expressions, and models contracting certain facial measures (as in the facial feedback hypothesis).  The six emotions were: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.  The seven emotion word labels were the six aforementioned emotions and contempt.

Participants viewed each of the 6 emotions in three different expressions.  All photos were of Caucasian males and females aged 30 to 40. Participants completed two separate tasks. In the single-emotion judgment task, participants viewed each photo for 10 seconds and checked ONLY ONE of the seven emotion words that represented the facial expression.  In the multiple-emotion judgment task, participants were shown each photo again for 30 seconds.  When viewing each photo, participants indicated how strongly each of the seven emotion labels were present in the facial expression on a 8-point scale (1 = slight; 4 = moderate; 8 = strong).  Table 7 shows the single-judgment emotion findings.  For all countries, even the isolated Minangkabau, a majority of participants selected the correct emotion label.  For the multiple-emotion judgment task, participants in all cultures provided the most intense rating for the emotions predicted in Table 7.  For instance, in the single-judgment task, if participants checked happiness for photo A, in the multiple-judgment task for the same photo A they rated happiness as most intensely present out of all seven emotion labels.

 

Table  7

Single-Judgment Task: Percentage of Correct Labels for Six Emotions Displayed in Photos  (Ekman et al., 1987)

Nation	Happiness	Surprise	Sadness	Fear	Disgust	Anger
Estonia	90	94	86	91	71	67
Germany	93	87	83	86	61	71
Greece	93	91	80	74	77	77
Hong Kong	92	91	91	84	65	73
Italy	97	92	81	82	89	72
Japan	90	94	87	65	60	67
Scotland	98	88	86	86	79	84
Sumatra	69	78	91	70	70	70
Turkey	87	90	76	76	74	79
United States	95	92	92	84	86	81

 

Adapted from “Universals and Cultural Differences in the Judgments of Facial Expressions of Emotion,” by P. Ekman, W.V. Friesen, M.  O’Sullivan, A. Chan, I. Diacoyanni-Tarlatzis, K.  Heider, R. Krause, W.A. LeCompte, T. Pitcairn, P.E. Ricci-Bitti, K.  Scherer, M. Tomita, and A. Tzavaras, 1987, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(4), p. 714 (https://doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.53.4.71). Copyright 2016 by the American Psychological Association.

Here is a timeline that shows Dr. Ekman’s work.

People have pointed out that although replicated across cultures, other limitations with this methodology exist. For instance, identifying emotions in still photos is much easier than identifying emotions in real life, where non-verbal and verbal behavior is quickly changing. A second problem is that participants can use a process of elimination to increase the chances of identifying the correct answer. For instance, when completing this activity in-class, many students state they identify disgust first and contempt last.

 

 

Ekman and Friesen’s (1978) Facial Action Coding System (FACS)

Ekman and Friesen (1978) developed a method for researchers and criminologists to identify emotions using facial expression changes. In this method, observers are looking for changes in people’s microexpressions, which can be broken down into action units. Microexpressions are changes in facial expressions that last from 1/15 to 1/25 of a second. Microexpressions are nonconscious and cannot be voluntarily controlled by the individual. Ekman believes that microexpressions convey our true emotion, but these microexpressions can quickly be masked by a macroexpression. A macroexpression is a change in facial expressions that lasts between ½ a second and 5 seconds. Macroexpressions tend to parallel the words and tone of voice, but may not necessarily match our true emotion.

To see animated examples of macroexpressions and microexpressions, scroll to the bottom of this website.

When using FACS to identify an individual’s emotional experience, the observer looks for action unit changes in the microexpression. Each action unit maps onto a specific facial muscle. Each identifiable emotion is a combination of several action units.

This website includes animated examples of action unit changes. Scroll to the very bottom of this website to see how action units are combined to categorize emotions. For example, the emotion joy is a combination of two action units – 6 (cheek lip raiser) and 12 (lip corner puller). The emotion disgust includes 3 action unit changes – AU9 + AU15 + AU16. Remember, basic emotion theory posits that changes should be unique to each emotion. So, every emotion should have a unique combination of action unit changes!