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Are Facial Expressions Universal?

2023-05-06 11:04:35

At some point in our lives, we all encountered this situation. You have been procrastinating for so long and I do not have time to do important projects. You missed the deadline for newspaper articles to be posted on the front page. You have forgotten your brother 's birthday party. People you know, you disappointment will not be happy. They may also be angry. Next time you see them, they will not call you at once, but you can see from their face that they are angry.

The face is very expressive and can express countless emotions without saying words. Unlike nonverbal communication, facial expressions are common. Happiness, sorrow, anger, disgust, confusion, fear, and expression of surprise are the same in every culture. This is useful for the conversation process. If you find a confused expression on the partner's face in the middle of a sentence, you can recognize it and change what you said earlier to make it easier to understand.

There is debate about whether facial expressions are universal problems or human problems. Advocates of the universal hypothesis claim that many facial expressions are congenital and derived from evolutionary ancestors. People who oppose this view doubt the accuracy of the research used to test this claim, but the facial expressions are conditional, and people observe and understand facial expressions from the surrounding social scene believe.

The universality hypothesis focuses on the ability of people to recognize naturally occurring spontaneous facial expressions. However, a facial expression used to test this hypothesis was proposed. Studies on spontaneous facial expressions are rarely conducted, and it has been found that participant's facial expression recognition is lower than the corresponding facial expressions. In most studies participants showed multiple facial expressions (Ekman proposed six with each facial expression). However, people have judged facial expressions compared with other people they see, and the recognition rate of participants who judged multiple facial expressions is higher than that of only one facial expression.

Scholars have generally insisted on understanding body language, especially facial expressions. In Darwin's (1872) evolution theory, he assumed that the emotional expression is hereditary. On the other hand, scholars question whether culture affects human emotional expression. Roughly speaking, these theories can be divided into two models. The cultural equivalence model predicts "Individuals should be equally accurate in understanding the emotions of both internal and external group members" (Soto & Levenson, 2009). This model is based on the evolution theory of Darwin (1872), where he points out that humans and animals are doing similar things like anger / attack, happiness and fear.