Judgments of emotion from spontaneous facial expressions of New Guineans

The claim that specific discrete emotions can be universally recognized from human facial expressions is based mainly on the study of expressions that were posed. The current study (N=50) examined recognition of emotion from 20 spontaneous expressions from Papua New Guinea photographed, coded, and labeled by P. Ekman (1980). For the 16 faces with a single predicted label, endorsement of that label ranged from 4.2% to 45.8% (mean 24.2%). For 4 faces with 2 predicted labels (blends), endorsement of one or the other ranged from 6.3% to 66.6% (mean 38.8%). Of the 24 labels Ekman predicted, 11 were endorsed at an above-chance level, and 13 were not. Spontaneous expressions do not achieve the level of recognition achieved by posed expressions.