Faces of Feeling: Exploring the Universality of Basic Emotions

All around the world, cultures differ in countless ways—how we organize time, express love, share meals, relate to authority, even how close we stand to one another. We speak with different words and gesture with different hands.

But what about emotions?

Are there feelings so deeply rooted that we all experience, show, and understand them the same way, no matter where - or who - we are?

This question first captured scientific attention through the eyes of Charles Darwin. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), he wrote:

Nearly a century later, psychologist Paul Ekman set out to challenge Darwin's idea. He suspected that emotional expressions were learned, not universal. To test this, he traveled to the isolated Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, conducting rigorous research in a place untouched by modern media (Ekman, 2007).

What he found surprised even him.

Across cultures—even among people who had never seen a photograph or television—Ekman observed that six basic emotions were recognized and expressed in strikingly similar ways: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust (Ekman, 1973, 1989). For example, in one of Ekman's early studies (Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969), participants from five different countries correctly identified these emotions on unfamiliar faces at impressively high rates:

Table 1: Basic Emotion Identification in Five Countries
(Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969)

In this activity, you participated in a similar task—decades after Ekman's original research, but guided by the same curiosity. You viewed 24 faces, each expressing one of the six basic emotions. Each face represented a range of ages, gender, and ethnicity. You selected which of the six basic emotions you believed was being expressed.

After finishing, you received feedback on your overall accuracy and accuracy of each specific emotion.
On average, people like you scored 78.8% correct (SD = 10.9%), 92% answered at least two-thirds correctly, 99% answered at least half correctly. But only 1% answered all 24 faces perfectly. Given pure chance would be about 17% correct (1 out of 6), our results replicate Ekman's and vividly demonstrate how intuitive basic emotion recognition is for most people (figure 1).

Although happiness was recognized with near-perfect accuracy, emotions like sadness and anger were more difficult to identify. Several factors help explain our results:

Sadness is often expressed more subtly. Genuine sadness tends to involve small, low-energy movements—a slight downturn of the mouth, softened eyes, a lowered gaze. These gentle signals can be easier to miss compared to more vivid emotions like happiness or surprise.

Anger shares features with other emotions. Facial expressions of anger can sometimes look similar to fear or disgust—furrowed brows, tightened mouths, narrowed eyes—making anger slightly harder to distinguish.

Positive emotions are recognized more easily. Research suggests that people tend to detect positive emotions like happiness more readily because they are socially encouraged and evolutionarily less threatening (Baumeister et al., 2001).

These patterns reflect not only how emotions are expressed, but also how social and evolutionary forces shape the way we perceive emotional cues.

While the basic emotions are universally recognized, different cultures shape when, how, and to what extent emotions are expressed. These patterns are called culturally specific "display rules" (Matsumoto, 1990). For example, in culturally diverse societies like the United States, smiling is often encouraged as a way to signal friendliness and reduce out-group bias, whereas in more homogeneous cultures, such as Russia, smiling at strangers can be seen as unnecessary or even insincere (Rychlowska et al., 2015).

These variations highlight how cultural context influences the surface of emotional life. Even when the underlying feelings are the same, the way emotions are expressed—or hidden—can differ dramatically based on shared social expectations.

Not every emotion shows itself fully. Sometimes people smile while feeling sadness underneath. Sometimes fear softens into appearing like politeness. Sometimes two emotions blend together, shading a face with complex, layered feeling.

You saw photographs where the outward expression didn't match the whole story - faces smiling for the camera but not smiling with their eyes, or faces that hinted at sadness, fear, or anger beneath a neutral surface.

Psychological research distinguishes between genuine smiles and social smiles. A real, heartfelt smile - a Duchenne smile - involves both the mouth and the eyes (Duchenne de Boulogne, 1862; Ekman & Friesen, 1982). But a posed smile often uses only the mouth, while the eyes stay relatively still, uncrinkled.

You were asked to judge these faces—not just for what they showed, but for what they felt.

Even when feelings were hidden or mixed, as a group you chose emotions way above chance. The average concealed/blended emotion score was 77.05% (SD = 21.22). Over two-thirds scored at least 75%.. And about 25% of activity participants participants score a perfect 100%!

Recognizing basic emotions taps into shared biological roots. Recognizing concealed and blended emotions taps into something deeper: our sensitivity to the layered truths of human feeling.

In real life, emotions are rarely pure.

People often carry two, three, even four feelings at once—hope tangled with fear, joy shadowed by grief.
The more we practice noticing, the more we honor the full, messy, beautiful truth of what it means to feel.

Pause and Reflect:

• Which emotions felt easiest for you to recognize?
• Which ones were harder—and why do you think that might be?
• How might this experience shape the way you notice emotions in everyday life?

Through this activity, we glimpsed something extraordinary: emotions - in their rawness, in their subtlety, in their universality -form a bridge between human hearts. Despite oceans, languages, generations, or differences in appearance, certain feelings shine through. Others hide, but never disappear.

To notice an emotion, whether bold or quiet, is to witness the humanity in another. And in doing so, we strengthen the threads of empathy, connection, and understanding that hold us all together.

Uneasy Feelings about Your Results?
Please remember your results with any activity are not who you are. Your results are a 'snapshot' of a moment when you did an activity. It's just one measure, a single thread, of the many strands of who you are. Any result is a guess with statistical error. And it's possible the measure is flawed in a way so it doesn't work for you. Please do not think of your results as definitive dogma. Instead they're a starting point for our self reflection. Please keep in mind too, self-reflection can feel uncomfortable. "Bad" feelings are not actually bad. They're information. So, even if your activity result is inaccurate and flawed, you might ask yourself what your feeling is trying to tell you? Trusted teachers, friends, and therapists can be helpful. I wrote an essay elaborating with concrete examples how we can appreciate uneasy feelings about our activity results.

Scholarly Information?
You're welcome to use Copernican Revolution activities and essays for your thesis and studies. Having information about scholarly aspects like psychometric data, activity design details, and norm calculations may help. The primary focus of my essays is connecting educated laypersons with psychology. To help people like you, with advanced academic interests, I add an appendix with each activity.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370.

Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London: John Murray.

Duchenne de Boulogne, G. B. (1862). The mechanism of human facial expression. (Translated 1990 by R. Andrew Cuthbertson.) Cambridge University Press.

Ekman, P. (1973). Cross-cultural studies of facial expression. In P. Ekman (Ed.), Darwin and facial expression: A century of research in review (pp. 169–222). Academic Press.

Ekman, P. (1989). The argument and evidence about universals in facial expressions of emotion. In H. Wagner & A. Manstead (Eds.), Handbook of social psychophysiology (pp. 143–164). Wiley.

Ekman, P. (2007). Emotions revealed: Recognizing faces and feelings to improve communication and emotional life. Henry Holt and Company.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1982). Felt, false, and miserable smiles. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 6(4), 238–252.

Ekman, P., Sorenson, E. R., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). Pan-cultural elements in facial displays of emotion. Science, 164(3875), 86–88.

Matsumoto, D. (1990). Cultural similarities and differences in display rules. Motivation and Emotion, 14(3), 195–214.

Rychlowska, M., Miyamoto, Y., Matsumoto, D., Hess, U., Gilboa-Schechtman, E., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2015). Heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts emotion recognition and cultural differences in emotional expressivity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(5), 843–860.