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hubie writes:

As we've seen in a recent story ("Customer Service Bots Are Getting Better at Detecting Your Agitation"), facial recognition software has moved beyond matching faces to trying to infer the emotional state of the face. At the heart of this effort is the assumption that, generally, facial expressions convey the same emotional state across cultures. Recent research shows this might not be the case.

In the 1960s, psychologist Paul Ekman came up with the method that has become the standard way to test this: present a collection of pictures of Westerners with different facial expressions to people living in isolated cultures and ask them what emotion was being conveyed. His research showed universality in understanding facial expressions across cultures. This has become an accepted axiom of this field ever since. However, in 2011, psychologists Carlos Crivelli and José-Miguel Fernández-Dols investigated the assumptions and methodology of the Ekman experiments. They traveled to the Trobriand Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea and performed their own experiment using pictures of facial expressions.

Crivelli found that they matched smiling with happiness almost every time. Results for the other combinations were mixed, though. For example, the Trobrianders just couldn’t widely agree on which emotion a scowling face corresponded with. Some said this and some said that. It was the same with the nose-scrunching, pouting, and a neutral expression. There was one facial expression, though, that many of them did agree on: a wide-eyed, lips-parted gasping face (similar to above [link]) that Western cultures almost universally associate with fear and submission. The Trobrianders said it looked “angry.”

The work is being well received in the field, such as by social psychologist Alan Fridlund who noted that the researchers did an excellent job immersing themselves in the Trobriander culture before conducting the experiment.

Despite agreeing broadly with the study’s conclusions, Fridlund doubts it will sway hardliners convinced that emotions bubble forth from a common font. Ekman’s school of thought, for example, arose in the post–World War II era when people were seeking ideas that reinforced our common humanity, Fridlund says. “I think it will not change people’s minds. People have very deep reasons for adhering to either universality or cultural diversity.”

An abstract is available: The fear gasping face as a threat display in a Melanesian society.

[How might this affect Unicode's emoticons (i.e. code points starting at \U0001F600)? -Ed.]

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