Filed with 60.21 Psychology · Related: 60.12 Self-Improvement · Ethics & Metaethics (MOC)

Myth 1: Paul Ekman’s heritage

The foundation of Paul Ekman’s theory can be summarized by the thesis that as far as facial expression is concerned, people display and recognize some emotions, which he called ‘basic’, in universal ways. No matter where we are and whom we are talking to, we will always recognize when our interlocutor is expressing five* emotions: anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness.

*Surprise was excluded from the list of basic emotions after the revision of the theory.

Paul Ekman’s basic emotions (plus neutral state) by Tim Roth, who has played the protagonist in the ‘Lie to me’ TV-series.

One of the first critics of Ekman’s theory was psychologist James Russell. He denied the idea of universality of emotions, claiming that the emotion-face link is not as straightforward as Ekman initially supposed: the same facial expression might have different meanings in different contexts. Later, Beatrice de Gelder in her book ‘Emotions and Body’ claimed that in fMRI experiments no neurological ground has been found in human brain to confirm that the various emotions are basic or universal.

More recently, a famous neuroscientist Lisa Barrett, one of the most prominent critics of Ekman’s basic emotions theory, claimed that emotions are not something inborn but rather learned through experiences. Emotions differ from culture to culture, from person to person. In a series of experiments a research team went to Namibia to check how would an isolated tribe, Himba, recognize happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral faces. While there were no complications with positive facial expressions, Himba people tended to mix negative expressions like disgusted or angry. When experiments were held in other tribes, similar results were obtained. Thus, Barrett concluded, the way we explain emotions is stereotypical for our culture — we give the same names to what actually has different nature.

Even though in 2011 Ekman has changed the definition of what he refers to as emotions, including cultural and individual specifics, and even excluded one emotion from the list of basic emotions, many companies that work with Affective Computing still base their methods on the old Ekman’s theory. They still include essence like ‘basic’ emotions in their datasets. And with this approach, as Liza Barrett has put it, they are going to fail. But, she says, if external and internal context is added, the technology holds the potential to revolutionize the science of emotion.

Laboratories and companies that work with emotional analytics should avoid the mistake of slipping into the bias of universality of emotions. First, the affective data used for the training of algorithms should be specific, that is — to take into account the culture, language, gender and even age when trying to determine what emotions are expressed. Second, emotion recognition algorithms should be sensitive to the context. What is important, some labs have done the attempts to integrate context (for instance, here), but no ‘big’ Affective Computing company has done it so far.