The Fear Factor -Sweene Oscar Facial Expressions such as happiness, sadness, fear, and anger seem to be universally recognized by humans.
Fear is thought to be the hardest emotion to identify and happiness, the easiest.
Infant research has supported these notions with the finding that happiness is the first emotion that babies recognize while fear is only identifiable in later infanthood. Research with the elderly has given additional support with the finding that fear is the first emotion that begins to be significantly misidentified in older adults while correct recognition of happiness is maintained until much later in life. Another important and well documented finding is that females are more accurate in the recognition of emotions than males. In studies of gender differences in communicating and identifying emotion via facial and vocal expressions, females were not only shown to be better overall perceivers of emotion but they were also seen to better identifiers of the most complex emotion, fear. Past research raise some very important questions.