Judgement Method

In the judgment method, participants identify emotions displayed on facial expressions in still photos. Recall that Ekman used the judgment method to test his hypothesis that facial expressions were universal. This method is often forced choice, where participants match emotion words from a list to the correct facial expression. Another way to determine the correct emotion would be to see if participants’ answer matches the emotions the people showing the facial expression feel. This method is beneficial when researchers are trying to gain new insights into new emotions. Yet, problems include that identifying emotions in still photos is easier than in real-life and that participants were provided emotion word labels and thus can use process of elimination to determine the correct answer.