In this paper, we evaluate the common view of facial expressions against a review of the evidence and conclude that it rests on a number of flawed assumptions and incorrect interpretations of research findings. Nonetheless, this common view continues to fuel commercial applications in industry and government (e.g., automated detection of emotions from faces), guide how children are taught (e.g., with posters and books showing stereotyped facial expressions), and impact clinical and legal applications (e.g., diagnoses of psychiatric illnesses and courtroom decisions). This common view of facial expressions remains entrenched in consumers of emotion research, as well as in some scientists, despite an emerging consensus among affective scientists that emotional expressions are considerably more context-dependent and variable. It is commonly assumed that a person’s face gives evidence of emotions because there is a reliable mapping between a certain configuration of facial movements, called a “facial expression,” and the specific emotional state that it supposedly signals.
This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions, and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements, as situations of everyday life.
But our review suggests there is an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of social information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. Yet there is substantial variation in how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, across cultures, situations, and even within a single situation. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, more than what would be expected by chance. In this paper, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the “common view”, and then examine the scientific evidence for this view with a focus on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.
It is commonly assumed that a person’s emotional state can be readily inferred from the person’s facial movements, typically called “emotional expressions” or “facial expressions.” This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices, guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications, and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision.
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