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Cross-cultural research suggests that there are about half a dozen basic facial expressions in humans, such as happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust. Around the world, people are very accurate at matching pictures of facial expressions to these six labels of emotion—translated into their language, of course. At first glance, these results suggest an innate ability to categorically perceive these six emotions. However, critics argue that this ability is driven by the labels that our languages have given us.
When people are instead shown pictures of facial expressions and asked to name the emotion, researchers find considerable variation both within and across cultures. There’s even more disagreement among people when they’re simply asked to judge whether two faces express the same emotion or not. These findings suggest that providing linguistic labels for emotions helps reduce the uncertainty that people otherwise experience when trying to recognize facial expressions, especially where there are no other context cues available.
Based on cross-cultural research, psychologist Paul Ekman claims there are seven universal facial expressions of emotion. Can you identify the expressed emotions in these pictures? (See below for the answers.)
Languages vary in the set of words they have to describe emotions. For example, the German language—just like English—has separate words for “disgust” and “anger.” However, Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of Mexico, uses the same term for both emotions. When German speakers were asked to name the emotion expressed in pictures of faces, they distinguished between those showing anger and those showing disgust, whereas the speakers of Yucatec Maya did not.
The researchers also asked the German and Yucatec Maya speakers to perform a delayed match to sample task. In this procedure, the person first sees one picture and then, after some time has passed, sees two new pictures. The person indicates which one is the same as the first.
Both German and Yucatec Maya speakers performed better when one of pictures displayed anger and the other disgust. This result isn’t surprising for the German speakers, who could rely on linguist labels to help them remember. But the Yucatec Maya speakers couldn’t do this, yet they still reliably distinguished anger and disgust, suggesting that these are innate categories—or at least categories learned without the aid of linguistic labels.
Not all psychologists agree that emotional states are categorical. Instead, they argue that emotions are constructed out of more basic psychological elements. For example, emotional states can involve either high or low levels of activation (alert v. fatigued) and a pleasant or unpleasant feeling (sad v. contented). In this view, emotional experience continuously varies, but linguistic labels coalesce these experiences into different categories.
Evidence from people who lack emotion words supports the idea that language at least aids in the construction of emotional categories. In one study, researchers tested patients suffering from semantic dementia. This is a brain disorder in which patients have considerable difficulty accessing word meanings.
These patients and normally functioning adults were asked to sort 36 facial images into as many piles as they wished. The healthy adults consistently sorted the pictures into six categories, representing the six facial expressions of anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, and neutral emotion.
However, the patients with semantic dementia only made three categories, one for happy expressions, another for neutral expressions, and a third pile that lumped together anger, fear, disgust, and sadness. In other words, these patients only distinguished emotions along a pleasant-neutral-unpleasant dimension.
Other research has looked at another group that doesn’t have words for emotions—babies. We can test whether infants can distinguish two categories through a habituation task. For example, we can show babies pictures of happy faces until they get bored and look away. We then switch to sad faces, and if the babies show renewed interest, we conclude that they can perceive the difference between happy and sad emotional expressions.
Infants respond similarly to the patients with semantic dementia. They can differentiate pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant emotional expressions, but they can’t distinguish between two unpleasant emotions, like anger and fear.
As children’s vocabularies increase, so does their ability to perceive distinctions in emotional expressions. It’s not until children are 3-4 years old that they can distinguish between sadness, fear, and anger. However, even seven-year-olds have difficulty separating disgust from anger.
Additional cross-cultural research suggests that language can have an influence on emotional perception. Speakers of Herero, a language spoken in Africa, were asked to do the same picture sorting task as the patients with semantic dementia. They generally agreed on what the categories were, but they sorted differently from speakers of English. This result suggests that people’s perceptions of emotional expression are influenced by their language and culture.
In the case of emotion perception, the relationship between innate perceptual processes and linguistic influences is complex. There appear to be core perceptual processes that are biologically based and therefore universal. However, there’s some leeway within the parameters of these innate processes for language to have an effect. By providing category labels in the form of words, our language guides us to attend to certain differences and ignore others.
Notes
The emotions expressed in the seven pictures are as follows. Top row: happiness, sadness, contempt; bottom row: fear, disgust, anger; far right: surprise.
The Himba woman appears to be expressing a Duchenne smile, which raises the corners of the mouth and forms crow's feet around the eyes. The Duchenne smile is considered an honest expression of positive emotion. However, subtle differences in facial expressions can have cultural significance.
References
Damjanovic, L., Roberson, D., Athanasopoulos, P., Kasai, C., & Dyson, M. (2010). Searching for happiness across cultures. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10, 85–107.
Gendron, M., Lindquist, K. A., Barsalou, L., & Barrett, L. F. (2012). Emotion words shape emotion percepts. Emotion, 12, 314–325.
Lindquist, K. A., Satpute, A. B., & Gendron, M. (2015). Does language do more than communicate emotion? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 99-108.
Sauter, D. A., LeGuen, O., & Haun, D. B. M. (2011). Categorical perception of emotional facial expressions does not require lexical categories. Emotion, 11, 1479–1483.
David Ludden is the author of The Psychology of Language: An Integrated Approach (SAGE Publications).
