Darwin was wrong: Facial expressions of emotion are not universal

The belief that all humans communicate six basic emotions through their facial expressions has been refuted by researchers at the University of Glasgow. It was Charles Darwin who first noted in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that people from different cultures express the same state of mind by the same facial movements, but the Glasgow researchers say this is not the case. Using a unique, sophisticated computer graphics platform developed at the University of Glasgow, researchers in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, and the School of Psychology were able to create the first-ever modelling of four-dimensional mental representations of six basic facial expressions in two cultures. Fifteen Western Caucasian and 15 East Asian subjects were selected to view 4,800 animated 3D images of faces exhibiting randomly generated facial movements. Subjects interpreted the random facial animations as expressive if the random facial movements corresponded to their mental representation of a specific facial expression. Thus, using their subjective perceptions, subjects categorised each facial animation according to the six basic emotions and rated the intensity of the emotion perceived. This allowed the researchers to identify the specific facial movements each culture uses to represent each of the six basic facial expressions of emotion.