It is commonly assumed that a person's emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

中文翻译：

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重新考虑情绪表达：从人类面部运动推断情绪的挑战。


人们普遍认为，一个人的情绪状态可以很容易地从他或她的面部动作（通常称为情绪表达或面部表情）推断出来。这一假设影响法律判断、政策决定、国家安全协议和教育实践；指导精神疾病的诊断和治疗，以及商业应用的开发；并渗透到日常社交互动以及人工智能、神经科学和计算机视觉等其他科学领域的研究中。在本文中，我们调查了这种广泛假设的例子，我们将其称为普遍观点，然后我们研究了检验这一观点的科学证据，重点关注情绪研究消费者使用的六种最流行的情绪类别：愤怒，厌恶、恐惧、快乐、悲伤和惊讶。现有的科学证据表明，人们有时确实会在快乐时微笑，在悲伤时皱眉，在愤怒时皱眉等等，正如普遍观点所提出的那样，比偶然预期的要多。然而，人们表达愤怒、厌恶、恐惧、快乐、悲伤和惊讶的方式在不同文化、不同情况下，甚至在同一情况下的不同人之间都有很大差异。此外，相似的面部动作配置不同地表达了不止一种情绪类别的实例。事实上，特定的面部动作，例如皱眉，通常传达的是情绪状态以外的东西。科学家们一致认为，面部动作传达了一系列信息，对于社交、情感或其他方面的交流都很重要。 但我们的评论表明，迫切需要进行研究，检验人们在日常生活的各种背景下实际上如何移动面部来表达情绪和其他社会信息，并仔细研究人们感知情绪实例的机制彼此之中。我们提出了具体的研究建议，这些建议将更有效地描述人们如何通过移动面部来表达情绪，以及如何从日常生活中的面部动作推断情感意义。这项研究对于为情感研究的消费者提供他们所需的转化信息至关重要。