Forty Studies: I Can See It All Over Your Face!

Bianca Varela

Title: I Can See It All Over Your Face!

Experimenter: P. Ekman & W. V. Friesen

Hypothesis: Members of a preliterate culture who had been selected to

ensure maximum vision isolation from literate cultures will identify the same
emotion concepts with the same faces as do members of literate Western
and Eastern cultures.

Subjects: The Fore people who inhabit the Southeast Highlands of New
Guinea – 189 adults and 130 children out of a population of about 11,000,
and 23 adults who have experienced a great deal of contact with Western
society.

Method: Researchers presents subjects with three photographs of different

facial expressions and read a brief description of an emotion-producing
scene of story that corresponded to one of the photographs. The subject
would then simply point to the expression that best matched the story. Forty
photographs of 24 different people were used as examples of six emotional
expressions: happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, and fear.

Results:
Emotion in Story Number of Subjects Percent Choosing
Correct Photograph

Happiness 220 92.3

Anger 98 85.3

Sadness 191 79.0

Disgust 101 83.0

Surprise 62 68.0

Fear 184 80.5

Fear (with surprise) 153 42.7

Significance of the Study: The significant of the study was that the
conclusion of particular facial behaviors being universally associated with
particular emotions was confirmed as true. It was shown that, no matter the
culture, or amount of exposure to popular media of any sort, the
connotations that come hand in hand with facial expression are universal
with every environment. It also suggests that the idea of facial expression is
innate, something we are hardwired with from birth.

Questions:
Why was there confusion between fear and surprise?
Why is facial expression universal – how does every facial expression
immediately have the connotation of fear or sadness throughout the world?
How did the researchers make sure that every picture could only have one
meaning?

Comments/Reaction:
This experiment interested me, in the way that it made me want to go out
and see if every person really does relate every facial expression the same.
It’s just interesting, how alike every human being is, when you simplify
every person to their core being – i.e. how habits, mannerisms, and
movements between every human being has at least one thing in common.

How Does the Article Relate to the Chapter We Are Studying?:

We are currently studying the chapter of emotion, and this study has to do
with emotion and understanding facial expressions in accordance to it.