On the Set of Emotions With Facial Signals

Which, if any, emotions have a facial signal? Studies from AI to Zoology sometimes presuppose an answer to this question. According to one important and influential research program, the basic (fundamental and discrete) emotions can be identified by their possession of a biologically based unique and universally recognized facial signal. To the classic set of six such emotions, researchers recently advanced 12 new candidates, which were examined in the present study with a standard free-labeling procedure in three samples: English-speaking Americans (n = 200), Mandarin-speaking Chinese (n = 101), and Malayalam-speaking Indians (n = 200). In the three samples, respectively, a majority of respondents chose the predicted label for only one, one, and none of the 12 faces. That is, a majority of respondents failed to choose the predicted label for 11 of the 12 faces in the English-speaking (proportion of respondents range for the 11: .04 to .45) and Mandarin-speaking (proportion of respondents range for the 11: .00 to .44) samples; a majority of respondents failed to choose the predicted label for any of the 12 faces in the Malayalam-speaking sample (proportion of respondents range: .00 to .42). The modal choice in the three samples was the predicted label for five, six, and one, respectively, of the 12 faces. "Recognition" of the predicted emotion was negligible (<15% of respondents) for five, eight (two of which were modal), and 10, respectively, of the 12 faces.