Ekman's Cross-Cultural Facial Expression Studies

Between 1967 and 1968 the psychologist Paul Ekman, together with colleagues including Wallace Friesen, traveled to Papua New Guinea to study the Fore, an isolated, largely preliterate highland people with minimal prior contact with Western media or culture, in order to test Charles Darwin's century-old hypothesis that certain facial expressions of emotion are biologically universal rather than learned through culture-specific convention. Ekman told Fore participants short emotional stories and asked them to select, from a small set of photographs of Western faces, the facial expression that matched the emotion in each story, and separately photographed Fore individuals' own spontaneous facial expressions in emotionally evocative situations, which North American observers who had never seen the Fore were later asked to interpret without any prior context. Ekman found that the Fore matched facial expressions to emotional stories at rates well above chance and consistent with Western samples, and that North American observers could likewise correctly identify the emotions expressed on Fore faces, for a small set of basic emotions including happiness, anger, fear, disgust, sadness and surprise. Published in a series of papers through 1971, the findings provided some of the strongest cross-cultural evidence to date that certain facial expressions of emotion are universally recognized across radically different cultures, supporting Darwin's original hypothesis and establishing Ekman's basic-emotions research program as a foundation of subsequent cross-cultural and affective psychology.