Emotions and Faces: Challenging Ekman

Paul Ekman is renown for his work on emotions and facial expressions. The view that these expressions are cross-culturally identifiable is now being challenged.

Lisa Barrett from Northeastern is challenging this theory:

She returned to those famous cross-cultural studies that had launched Ekman’s career—and found that they were less than watertight. The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think.

Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”

More here at mindhacks
the academic papers are referenced here at Neuroanthropology as well as review from Ekman
And the article from Boston magazine