Selection for universal facial emotion.
Abstract
Facial expression is heralded as a communication system common to all human populations, and thus is generally accepted as a biologically based, universal behavior. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust are universally recognized and produced emotions, and communication of these states is deemed essential in order to navigate the social environment. It is puzzling, however, how individuals are capable of producing similar facial expressions when facial musculature is known to vary greatly among individuals. Here, the authors show that although some facial muscles are not present in all individuals, and often exhibit great asymmetry (larger or absent on one side), the facial muscles that are essential in order to produce the universal facial expressions exhibited 100% occurrence and showed minimal gross asymmetry in 18 cadavers. This explains how universal facial expression production is achieved, implies that facial muscles have been selected for essential nonverbal communicative function, and yet also accommodate individual variation.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Homologous muscles have been documented in non-human primates.
“homologous muscles have been documented in non-human primates [27], [28], [29].”
From Survey on RGB, 3D, Thermal, and Multimodal Approaches for Facial Expression Recognition: History, Trends, and Affect-Related Applications (2016) · cites this paper as [27]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations
Sauter, D. A., Eisner, F., Ekman, P., & Scott, S. K. (2010) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0908239106 · Cited by 789 · see citing works
Corneanu, C. A., Simon, M. O., Cohn, J. F., & Guerrero, S. E. (2016) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2016.2515606 · Cited by 527 · see citing works
GibbonFACS: A Muscle-Based Facial Movement Coding System for Hylobatids
Waller, B. M., Lembeck, M., Kuchenbuch, P., Burrows, A. M., & Liebal, K. (2012) · International Journal of Primatology · doi:10.1007/s10764-012-9611-6 · Cited by 97 · see citing works
Self-citationDobson, S. D. (2009) · American Journal of Physical Anthropology · doi:10.1002/ajpa.20902 · Cited by 61 · see citing works
Embodied emotion impairment in Huntington’s disease
Trinkler, I., Devignevielle, S., Achaibou, A., Ligneul, R. V., Brugières, P., Cleret de Langavant, L., De Gelder, B., Scahill, R., Schwartz, S., & Bachoud-Lévi, A.-C. (2017) · Cortex · doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2017.02.019 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Comparative Anatomy of the Face
Burrows, A. M., & Cohn, J. F. (2014) · Encyclopedia of Biometrics · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-27733-7_190-3 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Waller, B. M., Cray, J. J., & Burrows, A. M.
- Affiliations
- University of Portsmouth (GB)
- Duquesne University (US)
- Venue
- Emotion
- Published
- 2008
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 435-439
- ISSN
- 1528-3542 (ISSN-L)
- 1931-1516
- OpenAlex
- W2052547525
- Cited by
- 126
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 9 · 2013: 2 · 2012: 10
- FWCI
- 13.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Emotion (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Nottingham Trent University's Institutional Repository (Nottingham Trent Repository) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Hemispheric Asymmetry in Neuroscience
- Keywords
- universal facial expressions, facial muscles, facial asymmetry, nonverbal communication, emotional expression, evolutionary selection, cadaveric dissection
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Affect, Aged, Aged, 80 and over, Communication, Biological Evolution, Facial Expression, Facial Muscles, Female, Humans, Male, Middle Aged
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
