
Instead, they were surprised to find only 35. When they sorted all these thousands of expressions into categories, the study authors expected to find several hundred variations of emotions.

With 7.2 million images of facial expressions from 31 countries, scientists used computer algorithms to discover that the human face can combine different muscles in different ways to express itself in 16,384 unique ways.
SMILE DRAWING DOWNLOAD
The current study is an expansion of previous research by the same study authors, which found that humans are able to correctly determine other people’s emotions about 75 percent of the time simply by observing blood flow changes around the nose, eyebrows, cheeks and chin.įor the current study, researchers created a list of 821 words to describe feelings and had these translated into other languages to download images across multiple cultures. “This was delightful to discover,” says study coauthor Aleix Martinez, a cognitive scientist and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university, “because it speaks to the complex nature of happiness.” It turns out, however, humans are meant to smile much more often than they grimace, scowl, frown or wince. Unless we are actors, most of us are probably unaware of the myriad ways our faces can be reconfigured to express emotions, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Yet perhaps most remarkable is that roughly half of these, 17 to be exact, are expressions of happiness.

A new Ohio State University study has determined that of the thousands of possibilities, there are but 35 universally accepted facial expressions. COLUMBUS, Ohio - Smile, and the whole world smiles with you.
