Americans and Palestinians judge spontaneous facial expressions of emotion.

The claim that certain emotions are universally recognized from facial expressions is based primarily on the study of expressions that were posed. The current study was of spontaneous facial expressions shown by aborigines in Papua New Guinea (Ekman, 1980); 17 faces claimed to convey one (or, in the case of blends, two) basic emotions and five faces claimed to show other universal feelings. For each face, participants rated the degree to which each of the 12 predicted emotions or feelings was conveyed. The modal choice for English-speaking Americans (n = 60), English-speaking Palestinians (n = 60), and Arabic-speaking Palestinians (n = 44) was the predicted label for only 4, 5, and 4, respectively, of the 17 faces for basic emotions, and for only 2, 2, and 2, respectively, of the 5 faces for other feelings. Observers endorsed the predicted emotion or feeling moderately often (65%, 55%, and 44%), but also denied it moderately often (35%, 45%, and 56%). They also endorsed more than one (or, for blends, two) label(s) in each face-on average, 2.3, 2.3, and 1.5 of basic emotions and 2.6, 2.2, and 1.5 of other feelings. There were both similarities and differences across culture and language, but the emotional meaning of a facial expression is not well captured by the predicted label(s) or, indeed, by any single label.