What type of facial expressions are there

The vast majority of the individuals from the five cultures agreed. Could it be that the reason they all agree is they have learned these expressions from the same place? Could the reason for their agreement be their similar background and experiences? Learned from media or actors, for example? To test this theory, Ekman came up with a solution. Why not go and find a culture that has been completely isolated from the rest of the world.

No TV, no magazines, no tourists? If facial expressions of emotion were learned from parents and teachers, then surely a stone-aged tribe would have an entirely different way of communicating emotion than those in western societies, right? This lead Ekman to the highlands of Papua New Guinea to meet a remote, primitive tribe called the Fore. If the Fore tribe displayed and interpreted the facial expression of emotion the same as their western counterparts, we would have substantial evidence of the universality of facial expressions.

This was later reversed for westerners judging the Papua New Guinea faces. Read each of the scenarios above, and then pick the picture below that you think best illustrates what would be on the face of the person in the story. There are so many more than just 7.

What about concern, the look of concentration, the lost in thought look, puzzled, confused. For example, Cowen noted, in the video clips, people around the world tended to gaze in awe during fireworks displays, show contentment at weddings, furrow their brows in concentration when performing martial arts, show doubt at protests, pain when lifting weights and triumph at rock concerts and competitive sporting events. Read the study: Sixteen facial expressions occur in similar contexts worldwide.

Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Based on observations of facial expressions typically associated with emotions Darwin hypothesized that they must have had some instrumental purpose in evolutionary history.

For example, lifting the eyebrows might have helped our ancestors respond to unexpected environmental events by widening the visual field and therefore enabling them to see more. Even though their instrumental function may have been lost, the facial expression remains in humans as part of our biological endowment and therefore we still lift our eyebrows when something surprising happens in the environment whether seeing more is of any value or not.

Following this tradition Ekman , claimed that there is a set of facial expressions that are innate, and they mean that the person making that face is experiencing an emotion; i. These facial expressions are clearly communicative in nature and they are used in combination with other meaningful movements those of the hands.

In sum, there is evidence that facial expressions mean things ranging from possibly universal messages, i. How does one account for the range of meanings and uses of facial expressions? Following Wierzbicka , we argue that facial expressions are semiotic units form-meaning pairings that can be analyzed with the same semantic methodology used to analyze words see, Wierzbicka, , for an account of her methodology.

Two further working assumptions that we adopt from Wierzbicka , p. Assumption a is also made by Dachkovsky and Sandler , although as far as we understand, they limit this claim to facial expressions used as prosodic units. Assumption b is shared by Ekman. Note that in general a strong argument can be made that some facial expressions are innate because they are also produced by congenitally blind persons Matsumoto and Willingham, , but determining their meaning is a matter of greater controversy.

To illustrate the controversy, we will briefly discuss the meaning of brow raise, as we use this facial expression as an example throughout this paper. She suggests instead that the meanings of facial expressions can be better expressed using terms from the natural semantic metalanguage Wierzbicka, for which she has some evidence of universality. As regards facial expressions in general, we propose that their differences and similarities can be explained in terms of three dimensions: semantic, iconic and compositional.

These dimensions are derived from our first working assumption; that some facial expressions are semiotic units form-meaning pairings. The semantic dimension refers to the meaning part of the semiotic unit, the iconicity dimension to the nature of the relationship between the form and the meaning, and compositionality to the way the semiotic unit can combine with other semiotic units to form complex semiotic structures. The semantic dimension spans meanings that are universal to those which are culture specific.

The iconic dimension spans the varying degrees in which facial expressions resemble their meaning. The compositionality dimension spans the degrees in which facial expressions readily combine with other semiotic units to form complex structures.

A similar proposition to this has been made to account for the range of hand movements used by humans, covering the co-speech gestures of hearing individuals to signing by Deaf individuals McNeill, In this mini review we summarize evidence from acquisition of facial expressions by signers to support our view.

We first present a brief overview of the role of the face in sign language structure. We then describe the proposed dimensions and the findings on acquisition of facial expressions by Deaf signers that support them, after which we come to a conclusion. Note that to the best of our knowledge currently there only exists acquisitional data on non-manuals for American Sign Language ASL and so the examples below all refer to ASL.

Sign languages are the naturally occurring linguistic systems that arise within a Deaf community and, like spoken languages, have phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels of structure e. Cognitive and neurocognitive data provide evidence that signed and spoken languages are processed in a similar manner; for example, they show similar lexical access effects Baus et al. Facial and head movements are used in sign languages at all levels of linguistic structure.

At the phonological level some signs have an obligatory facial component in their citation form Liddell, ; Woll, Facial actions mark relative clauses, content questions and conditionals, amongst others, although there is some controversy whether these markings should be regarded as syntactic or prosodic cf. Liddell, ; Baker-Shenk, ; Aarons et al. Signers also use the face to gesture Sandler, Below we describe how these uses of the face can be described in terms of three dimensions; semantic, compositional, and iconic with evidence from facial expression acquisition.

The semantic dimension refers to the meaning part of a semiotic unit. It has been proposed, especially for the meanings of facial expressions, that there are universal meanings and culture specific meanings.

The brow raise appears to be used both with and without accompanying speech. For example, hearing people may use brow raise while asking a yes-no question Ekman, , and when they are confronted with something unexpected in the environment.

Within sign languages too, brow raise is used in different contexts; it can mark yes-no questions and the antecedent of conditionals. Dachkovsky and Sandler , p. We do not mean, however, that the concept cannot be explained to someone whose language does not have a word for it. The semantically universal facial expressions are logically the first to appear in acquisition.

By children are raising their brows in what Izard et al. We use the term iconicity to mean a form-meaning resemblance. Resemblance by its nature is a matter of degree. Some facial expressions resemble their meanings to a greater degree than others. We do not have data on facial expressions used either by hearing or deaf people that are completely arbitrarily related to their meaning; however we think this is in principle possible because many semiotic units, especially in spoken language, do not appear to display any form-meaning resemblance.

In acquisition, since the universal expressions appear first, and since universal meanings would seem to necessarily have a form that is motivated by meaning Wierzbicka, , p. Even when signing children start combining expressions with signs at , the first types they use are emotion related facial expressions with emotion concept signs McIntire and Reilly, ; Reilly et al. Above we saw that brow raise can be used alone or in combination with other semiotic units such as words, i.