Of all the faces we can make, only 35 express the same emotions across cultures.
You don’t have to be Jim Carrey to recognize that the human face is amazingly elastic and expressive. We can squint, flare our nostrils, purse our lips—yeah, it’s a lengthy list, and all of those moves can reveal how we’re feeling. But of all the thousands of faces we can make, a new study suggests only 35 express the same emotions across cultures.
Happiness, though, is the big winner, signified by 17 different expressions that are “readable” across cultures. That suggests there’s something special about the subtlety with which our faces show happiness.
“This was delightful to discover, because it speaks to the complex nature of happiness,” Aleix Martinez, study co-author and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University, said in a statement.
That massive store of images was sorted into categories, with researchers looking for those that expressed emotion across cultures. They’d calculated that the human face has about 16,384 unique configurations, so expected to find at least a few hundred emotions expressible across cultures.
Instead, they found only 35, and they were heavily skewed toward expressing happiness. The study showed that small facial details such as the size of a smile and the crinkles near our eyes can alter expressions of happiness. (Remember “smizing”?) “Happiness acts as a social glue and needs the complexity of different facial expressions,” Martinez notes, and even across cultures we notice these small differences. Happiness, in all its many forms, is a glue that brings us together.
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