Emotions are universally recognized from facial expressions-or so it has been claimed. To support that claim, research has been carried out in various modern cultures and in cultures relatively isolated from Western influence. A review of the methods used in that research raises questions of its ecological, convergent, and internal validity. Forced-choice response format, within-subject design, preselected photographs of posed facial expressions, and other features of method are each problematic. When they are altered, less supportive or nonsupportive results occur. When they are combined, these method factors may help to shape the results. Facial expressions and emotion labels are probably associated, but the association may vary with culture and is loose enough to be consistent with various alternative accounts, 8 of which are discussed. "Everyone knows that grief involves a gloomy and joy a cheerful countenance. . . . There are characteristic facial expressions which are observed to accompany anger, fear, erotic excitement, and all the other passions" (Aristotle, nd/1913, pp. 805, 808). Aristotle was not proposing a new idea but was cataloging what was known on the topic of physiognomy. The theory was that a person's physical appearance, especially in the face, reveals deeper characteristics: Poor proportions reveal a rogue, soft hair a coward, and a smile a happy person. ' Today, few psychologists share Aristotle's belief about the meaning of poor proportions or soft hair, but many share his beliefs about facial expression and emotion. Oatley and Jenkins (1992) observed, "By far the most extensive body of data in the field of human emotions is that on facial expressions of emotion" (p. 67). Recent reviews of those data (see Table 1 ) agree that the face reveals emotion in a way that is universally understood: Happiness, surprise, fear, anger, contempt, disgust, and sadness-these seven emotions, plus or minus two, are recognized from facial expressions by all human beings, regardless of their cultural background. As Matsumoto (1990) said, "the universality of facial expressions of emotion is no longer debated in psychology" (p. 195). This study was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I thank Mita Banerjee, Dee-Ann Matsugu, Lara Weick, Lisa Wong, and Janet Wu for their bibliographic work; Rachel Fouladi for her help with statistical matters; and Steve Moon and Jacalyn Snodgrass for their advice; and Liz McCririck for her patient typing. I thank those scholars who provided comments on a draft of this article: Linda Camras, Nicole Chovil, Ken Craig, Paul Ekman, Phoebe Ellsworth, Jose Miguel Fernandez Dols, Nice Frijda, Carroll Izard, Tony Manstead, Keith Oatley, Harriet Oster, and Hugh Wagner. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to James A. Russell, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 12.4. Electronic mail may be sent to jrussell@cortex.psych.ubc.ca. Rather, it is a "fact," the implications of which are debated. Defending the idea of basic emotions against Turner's (1990) criticisms, Ekman (1992b) and Izard (1992) pointed to universal facial expressions. Turner and Ortony (1992) replied, "We do not (and did not) dispute the fact that there are universal facial expressions associated with certain emotions" (p. 566). If universality is a fact, then the implications are far-reaching indeed. D. E. Brown (1991) and Buss (1992) cited the existence of universal facial expressions as one of six key cases in their argument for bringing back the concept of human nature. For some theorists, universality is deeply revealing about the nature of emotion. For others, universality is a finding that must be accounted for by any viable theory of emotion (e.g., Oatley, 1992) . Izard (1971, p. 188) wrote, "Emotion at one level is neuromuscular activity of the face" (emphasis Izard's). DePaulo (1992) wrote, "The fact that facial expressions of basic emotions are fundamentally the same across cultures (e.g., Ekman, 1972; Izard, 1971 ) is consistent with the position that there may be automatic links between the experiencing of the basic emotions and the expression of those emotions" (pp 205-206). Oatley and Jenkins (1992) pointed to facial expressions when they argued for the discreteness of emotions: "Investigators have found expressions specific to discrete emotions. Emotions may be considered discrete in the sense that they are produced and recognized pan-culturally" (p. 67). According to one proposal (although subsequently modified; Ekman, 1992a), whether a particular state is an emotion can be determined by that state's association with a universal facial expression: "There is a distinctive pancultural signal for each emotion.. . . If there is no distinctive universal facial expression associated with a given state, which functions as a signal, I propose that we not call that state an emotion" (Ekman, 1984, p. 330). 1 Although the book quoted in this paragraph has been attributed to Aristotle, it may have been written or compiled by his students (Evans, 1969) . Table 1 Conclusions from Recent Reviews of Research on the Universality Thesis Source Conclusion 1. Ekman(1980) 2. Izard(1980) 3. Frijda(1986) 4. Fridlund, Ekman, and Oster(1987) 5. Gudykunst and TingToomey(1988) 6. Buck (1988) 1. Izard and Saxton( 1988) 8. Oster, Daily, and Goldenthal(1989) 9. D. E. Brown (1991) 10. Mesquita and Frijda (1992) 11. Carlson and Hatfield (1992) "Are facial expressions of emotion the same for all human beings?" (p. 91). "Definitive data are now available on the question of universality" (p. 93). "There is conclusive scientific evidence to resolve the question of universality" (p. 96). "There are some facial expressions of emotion which are universal" (p. 137). "Impressive evidence for the innateness and universality of six of the fundamental emotions: enjoyment (happiness), distress (sadness), anger, disgust, surprise, and fear" (p. 201). "Since all human beings recognize these expressions and attribute to them the same experiential significance, it is reasonable to infer that they are genetically based or preprogrammed" (p. 185). "Many facial expressions. . . occur throughout the world in every human race and culture. The expressions appear to represent, in every culture, the same emotions" (p. 67). "Observers label certain facial expressions of emotion in the same way regardless of culture" (p. 157). "The research cited indicates that facial expressions representing the basic emotions are recognized universally" (p. 182). "Research on the communication of emotion via facial expression suggests that certain displays appear and are correctly recognized in widely different cultures" (p. 351). "The evidence for the innateness and universality of the expressions of the fundamental emotions is sufficiently robust to consider Darwin's hypothesis as an established axiom of behavioral science" (pp. 651-652). "Conclusive evidence for the universality of certain facial expressions has come from studies in which observers were asked to identify the emotions shown in photographs of facial expressions" (p. 114). "The conclusion seems inescapable: There are universal emotional expressions" (p. 26). "Certain facial expressions of emotion appear to be universal across cultures" (p. 14) . "There appears to exist a universal human set of emotion reaction modes [including] facial expressions" (p. 21). "Ekman and other psychologists have uncovered compelling evidence that six basic emotions are expressed in much the same ways in all cultures" (p. 221). The theories and ideas mentioned so far, their logical relations, and their evidentiary base are an important part of the psychology of emotion. The present article focuses on just one basic assumption: Emotions are universally recognized from facial expressions. After a brief historical sketch of and several comments on this thesis, I describe the key evidence on which it rests and raise questions about the methods used to gather that evidence. I then describe various alternative accounts of the data. My view of the history of this topic is somewhat different than that usually presented. Most recent articles on facial expression begin not with Aristotle, but with Charles Darwin. The history of research on the universality thesis was described by Ekman (1980) in terms of Darwin's (1872 Darwin's ( /1965 ideas, challenges to Darwin, the rejection of Darwin, and, finally, "a conclusive answer to one of Darwin's questions, and an answer in agreement with Darwin's own conviction. There are some facial expressions of emotion which are universal" (p. 137). In his review, Izard (1971) referred to the universality of facial expressions as "Darwin's hypothesis"(p. 225). Izard (1971) wrote that some researchers agreed that "Darwin was right" and others that "Darwin was wrong." Izard (1971) described one major review of the available evidence on facial expressions as "anti-Darwinian" (p. 225). Darwin was not the originator of the universality thesis. Before Darwin's book appeared in 1872, facial expressions of emotion were a topic of great interest (Bain, 1855 (Bain, , 1859 Bell, 1806; Duchennede Boulogne, 1862 Piderit, 1867; Spencer, 1855) and were apparently assumed to be universal. For instance, in a book written before Charles Darwin was born, Bell (1806) wrote, The violent passions mark themselves so distinctly on the countenance, both of man, and of animals, that we are apt in the first instance to consider the movements by which they are indicated, as certain signs or characters provided by nature for the express purpose of intimating the internal emotion; and to suppose that they are interpreted by the observer in consequence of a peculiar and instinctive faculty. (Bell, 1806, p. 84) Duchenne de Boulogne (1862/1990) referred explicitly to 104 JAMES A. RUSSELL universality. He attributed facial expression to a creator and wrote that once this language of facial expression had been created, it sufficed for Him to give all human beings the instinctive faculty of always expressing their sentiments by contracting the same muscles. This rendered the language universal and immutable, (p. 19) In turn, Duchenne drew on even earlier work, such as that of the artist Le Brun (1702 Brun ( /1982 . Nor was Le Brun the originator of the idea of universality. Aristotle's words quoted at the beginning of this article express an idea that can be found in Greek and Roman writers of antiquity (Evans, 1969) . Darwin (1872 Darwin ( / 1965 ) drew on the work of his many predecessors (Montgomery, 1985) and stated himself that the universality of facial expression "has often been asserted," although "without much evidence" (p. 15). As a first step in his research program, Darwin thus sought evidence for the universality thesis "with all the races of mankind" (pp. 14-15). Still, Darwin's principal goal was not to establish universality, but to provide an evolutionary rather than creationist account of the origins of facial expressions. In short, the universality thesis predates Darwin by several thousand years. That facial expressions might not be universal appears not to have occurred to most people. Both evolutionists and creationists believed in universality. Universality is a background assumption, a part of common sense, at least in Western cultures. Whether the same holds true in other cultures is the topic of this article. In the 20th century, the scientific study of emotion and facial expression was taken up by experimental psychologists. The earliest work (e.g., Feleky, 1914; Langfeld, 1918a Langfeld, , 1918b did not cite Darwin but attributed to common sense the idea that emotions can be seen in the face. For example, Langfeld (1918a) commented, "It did not need this experiment to prove the well known fact that emotions and attitudes could be judged from pictures" (p. 183). Although some of the results agreed with this commonsense view, there soon appeared evidence that questioned whether emotions could be reliably judged from pictures of faces, even within our own culture. Different observers provided different emotion labels for the same expression (Buzby, 1924; Feleky, 1922) . Observers were found to be swayed by the label that the experimenter suggested (Fernberger, 1928) . The emotion attributed to a face could be altered by training (Allport, 1924; Guilford, 1929) . When actual rather than simulated emotions were studied, the resulting facial expressions did not seem to reveal that emotion (Landis, 1924) . The emotion attributed to infants depended more on the infant's situation than on facial behavior (Sherman, 1927) . The 1920s were a low point in the fortunes of the universality thesis. In 1938, a review and reanalysis of some of these data convinced Woodworth that disagreements over what emotion was shown in a particular face were more apparent than real. Earlier researchers had assumed that each emotion would have a unique facial expression. Woodworth first grouped together synonyms and words for closely related emotions (e.g., wonder, astonishment, amazement, and surprise). He then joined the groups into even broader clusters (e.g., joining the love, happiness, and mirth groups into one cluster, and joining the fear and suffering groups into another). Scoring any response within the resulting broad cluster as correct eliminated much of the disagreement. When the six clusters were then ordered by similarity into a linear scale, most of the remaining disagreement was found to be minor. For example, disagreements in labeling the expressions of fear-and-suffering were not spread evenly across the five remaining clusters but tended to be only one step away: "Errors" were most often labels either from the surprise cluster on one side or from the anger and determination cluster on the other. When Feleky's (1922) seemingly negative judgment data were reanalyzed by Woodworth's method, the correlation between the emotion intended and that judged was .92. Schlosberg (1941 Schlosberg ( , 1952 Schlosberg ( , 1954 Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954 ) pursued Woodworth's approach, first altering the linear scale to a circular one. Schlosberg asked what the members of the broad clusters formed by Woodworth had in common. What, for example, unites love, happiness, and mirth? or fear and suffering? Schlosberg's suggestion was such things as degree of pleasantness versus unpleasantness. In his final version, Schlosberg (1954) suggested three such underlying dimensions: pleasant-unpleasant, degree of activation, and attention-rejection. Triandis and Lambert (1958) and Osgood (1966) took Schlosberg's idea cross-culturally and found similar dimensions. The history of this topic has sometimes been presented as if it were a conflict between two opposing camps. For example, Ekman( 1984) wrote, For more than 100 years scientists argued about whether facial expressions are universal or specific to each culture. On one side Darwin (1872), and, more recently, Lorenz (1965 and EiblEibesfeldt (1972), argued that facial expressions are innate, evolved behavior. On the other side, Birdwhistell (1970) , Klineberg (1940) , LaBarre (1947) , Leach (1972), and Mead (1975) , argued that facial expressions are instead like a language, socially learned, culturally controlled, and variable in meaning from one setting to another, (p. 319) Various positions have actually been taken on these questions. Undoubtedly, writers of one extreme persuasion or the other can be found, but middle views can be found as well. As important examples of a middle view, I would cite Klineberg (1940) , Woodworth and Schlosberg (1954) , Bruner and Tagiuiri (1954) , Triandis and Lambert (1958), and Osgood (1966) . First, consider Klineberg, the only psychologist cited in the quotation above and whom Ekman (1980) had earlier listed as one of Darwin's chief antagonists. Klineberg (1938) had reported that people in other cultures sometimes used unfamiliar facial expressions to signal their emotions, as when a Chinese novel described a character as sticking out his tongue in surprise. In his textbook, Klineberg (1940) detailed evidence of cultural variation, but he also wrote that "undoubtedly certain types of expressive behavior. . . are common to all human societies" (p. 176). He mentioned laughing with joy and tears in grief. Klineberg (1940) kept faith in the universality thesis in the face of cultural variation through three propositions. First, even if some facial expressions (such as the Chinese tongue protrusion) were culture specific, other expressions (such as laughing and crying) could still be universal; thus the culture specificity FACIAL EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTION 105 of one expression did not speak against the universality of another. Second, culture might determine whether natural expressions were permitted, inhibited, or exaggerated. To illustrate, Klineberg (1940) cited large cultural variation in weeping from grief. This normative control later came to be called a display rule. Third, culture could determine what emotion occurred in a given situation. For example, having her husband take a second wife might be a source of pride in one society but might be a source of jealousy in another. Thus, witnessing their husband's second marriage, the wives in these two cultures would not show the same facial expression because they would not be experiencing the same emotion. As further examples of a middle view, consider Woodworth and Schlosberg (1954) and their colleagues. In their concluding paragraph on facial expression, they disagreed with Klineberg's (1938 Klineberg's ( , 1940 ) emphasis on cultural variation. They then wrote: "One emerges from a study of this topic with the conviction that there are certain basic emotional patterns in man" (p. 132, emphasis in the original). Triandis and Lambert (1958) and Osgood (1966) offered cross-cultural evidence for this conviction. As a final example, consider Bruner and Tagiuiri's (1954) review, characterized by Izard (1971, p. 225) as "anti-Darwinian." Bruner and Tagiuiri (1954) pointed to the sobering negative findings that had accumulated, mainly in the 1920s, but they also pointed to positive findings: Other [researchers] have shown that emotional expressions were labeled with considerable accuracy (e.g., Darwin, 1872; Schulze, 1912; Feleky, 1914; Langfeld, 1918; Ruckmick, 1921; Stratton, 1921; Goodenough, 1931; Woodworth, 1938; Munn, 1940) ." (p. 635) Bruner and Tagiuiri (1954) emphasized Woodworth's (1938) and Schlosberg's (1941) analyses of these conflicting findings, apparently agreeing with the conclusion that "as a whole, judges of emotions from posed photographs do strikingly well" (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954, p. 365 In 1962, Tomkins published the first volume on his theory that was to mark the beginning of the modern era in the study of facial expression. Tomkins (1980) declared that "affect primarily is facial behavior." Tomkins (1962Tomkins ( -1963 provided the list of so-called basic emotions that, with minor modifications, stands today and provided evidence that these emotions are easily read from facial expressions (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964) . Tomkins inspired and tutored Ekman and Izard, who provided the most widely cited cross-cultural studies, including studies in isolated, illiterate societies (Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971) . Ekman and Izard also reviewed the relevant literature, describing their own vision of the history of the field (Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1972; Izard, 1971) . For example, Ekman (1992b) wrote of the state of affairs in 1962: "Facial expressions were then considered to be an inaccurate source of culture-specific information" (p. 552). Ekman and Izard's ideas and cross-cultural studies entered introductory psychology texts in the late 1970s (Braun & Linder, 1979; Kagan & Havemann, 1976; London, 1978) . In 1987, Ekman and his colleagues concluded that most psychologists had shifted to their position. Precisely what is meant by the universality thesis? Before any thesis along these lines can be verified, it has first to be formulated in a clear way. The universality thesis can be found asserted in textbooks, chapters, and journal articles, but it is not always clear exactly what is being asserted. For example, precisely how did the conclusions regarding universality reached by Ekman (1972 ), Izard (1971 , and their colleagues differ from the conclusions of Klineberg (1940) , Bruner and Tagiuiri (1954 ), and Woodworth and Schlosberg (1954 )? Ekman (1972 acknowledged the evidence of cultural variation and defended the universality thesis against such evidence through the same three ideas used by Klineberg (1940) : Cultural variation could be accounted for (a) through some gestures being culture specific and others being universal; (b) through cultural norms that regulated when to mask, inhibit, or exaggerate natural facial expressions; and (c) through cultural influence on the cause of emotion. Although their predecessors' conclusions were cautious and complex and the new tone was more confident, the substantive difference was surprisingly difficult to state. It appeared to consist of two assertions: (a) Certain facial expressions are "easily recognized" (Izard, 1977, p. 501); 2 and (b) recognition is in terms of discrete, "specific emotion categories" (Izard, 1977, p. 502)-such as happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, and sadness-rather than the overlapping broad clusters and dimensions suggested by Woodworth (1938) and Schlosberg (1941 Schlosberg ( , 1952 Schlosberg ( , 1954 . However, even these differences are not perfectly clear. What amount of agreement constitutes easy recognition? Under what circumstances is recognition predicted to be easy? And what is the precise difference between recognition in terms of discrete, specific emotion categories and recognition in terms of broad clusters? Izard (1971) counted a fair range of freely generated emotion labels as supporting his hypothesis. In contrast, Friesen (1988) criticized Izard (1971) for this broad range and seemed to presuppose a one-to-one correspondence between a specific emotion term and a specific facial expression. Ekman (1992b) argued that the number of basic emotions could thus be revealed by studies of facial expression. Asking how to cut nature at the joints in the domain of emotion, Ekman (1992b) wrote, "I am tempted to say that those joints are na-2 Secondary sources have read this message clearly. For example, according to Carlson and Hatfield's (1992) textbook on the psychology of emotion, "sadness is a universal emotion easily recognized by all peoples, in all times, and at all places" (p. 266). "It is easy to recognize the face of anger.. . . The look is unmistakable" (p. 350). JAMES A. RUSSELL kedly exposed by the findings on universality in expression" (p. 552). Yet, Ekman (1992a) also wrote not of specific discrete emotion categories, but of emotion families, thereby returning toward Woodworth's (1938)  Who said what on which occasion is less important than the question of what conclusion is warranted by the evidence. My focus in this article is not on the position of any one writer, but rather on how far the evidence goes. Let me propose therefore that the universality thesis be thought of as a family of hypotheses. Variations arise in three principal ways. First, the phrase universality thesis could describe propositions of varying specificity. At the nonspecific end of the continuum would fall the vague claim that some facial movements have some sort of emotional meaning, which is understood at above-chance levels by some humans in most cultures. At the other end of the continuum would fall the claim that, for example, exactly seven separate specific facial configurations signal the corresponding number of separate specific emotions, which are easily recognized as such by all humans. The conclusions reached by Klineberg (1940) , Bruner and Tagiuiri (1954) , and Woodworth and Schlosberg (1954) fall toward the nonspecific end of the continuum; conclusions by Izard (1971) and Ekman (1972) appear to fall toward the more specific end. More recently, Izard (1990) and Ekman (1992a Ekman ( , 1992b Ekman ( , 1993 may have taken somewhat different positions. The universality thesis could be taken to have various degrees of ecological relevance. A narrow interpretation would be that emotional facial signals can occur and can be recognized, but only under limited circumstances. A broader, more ecologically relevant, interpretation would be that unless there is a deliberate attempt at deception, the face naturally expresses the emotions that occur in everyday life and that observers routinely recognize the emotions expressed. In other words, this distinction is between competence and performance. Older evidence emphasized ecological relevance (Landis, 1924; Munn 1940; Sherman, 1927) ; more recent evidence, less so (Izard, 1971) . Older, more cautious reviews were more concerned with ecological relevance (Bruner & Tagiuiri, 1954) ; more recent, more optimistic reviews, less so Izard, 1971) . Izard (personal communication, November 10,1992) emphasized a more narrow interpretation of his version of the universality thesis. In contrast, Ekman and Friesen (1975) emphasized the relevance of their findings to everyday situations, and Ekman, O'Sullivan, and Matsumoto (199 la) emphasized the question of ecological validity in evaluating research on facial expression. The universality thesis is ambiguous in yet another way. Four related propositions can be distinguished: (a) universality of facial movements: specific patterns of facial muscle movement occur in all human beings, (b) expressiveness of facial movements: certain facial patterns are manifestations of the same emotions in all human beings, (c) universality of attribution: observers everywhere attribute the same emotional meaning to those facial patterns (in a commonly seen phrase, those facial patterns have universal signal value), 3 and (d) correctness of attributions: observers are correct in the emotions they (consensually) attribute to those facial patterns. The last proposition, of course, presupposes the first three. In much of the writing on this topic, these four propositions are not distinguished. Indeed, our everyday language invites their being confused. The phrase facial expression implies that facial movement has a meaning, which it expresses. The word recognition implies that what is recognized is really there. English words for facial movements, such as frown, are so imprecise that researchers are forced to speak instead of the "facial expression of fear," the "facial expression of anger," and so on. Thus, English words for facial movements imply their expression of specific emotions, which are there to be recognized or not. Less often, distinctions are noted, and an explicit argument is offered for combining these propositions. For example, Oster, Daily, and Goldenthal (1989) argued that if observers from very different cultures-including isolated, preliterate cultures-see the same emotions in the same faces, we can confidently conclude that these expressions have universal meaning. We can also infer that this meaning is derived from the observers' experience with spontaneous expressions observed in real-life, emotion-arousing situations in their own cultures. That is, we can infer that the expressions themselves are universal, (p. 114) 5 3 The word attribution is to be taken in as neutral a way as possible. There is no consensus on just what sort of process occurs when the observer "sees" an emotion in the face of another. Writers have used words such as label, categorize, identify, see, and recognize. The process might be innate or learned, conscious or unconscious, prepositional or nonpropositional. On such questions, my review is noncommittal. 4 To maintain some helpful distinctions, a convention is adopted in this article whereby emotion words used by observers are italicized (e.g., the word happy), but emotion labels used by researchers to refer to specific patterns of facial movement are in quotation marks (e.g., an expression of "happiness"). On the other hand, the words recognition and facial expression are used for lack of a simple alternative. Recognition simply means here a judgment that conforms to prediction. Facial expression simply means here facial movement. 5 Caution rather than confidence is required in considering such arguments. Imagine that a man rubs his abdomen and, with both hands, rapidly pushes imaginary food into his mouth; that he cups his hands, throws back his head, and pretends to pour something down his throat; or that he closes his eyes and places the side of his head on his joined hands. It is possible that observers from very different cultures-including isolated, illiterate cultures-would see hunger, thirst, and sleep in these pantomi mes. If that is so, then do the pantomimes have meaning derived from spontaneous actions observed in real-life situations and are the pantomimes themselves universal? The pantomimes presumably capture something of real-life action, but in an exaggerated, stylized form. One would not infer that the exact actions of the pantomime ordinarily accompany hunger, thirst, and sleep. Of course, facial expressions are not pantomimes, and my point here is a logical one. But this example does coincidentally underline a question that arises in the FACIAL EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTION Of course, these four propositions may be related empirically, and specific theories can predict links among them. But for analyzing the evidence, I believe that these four propositions are best kept separate, until proven otherwise. After all, it is at least conceivable that emotions are expressed by the face universally but that some cultures have failed to recognize this fact. Perhaps attribution of emotions to faces is a cultural achievement, which in our culture is partially correct but not perfect. Some other cultures might do better, and some worse. Alternatively, it is also at least conceivable that people falsely attribute emotions to facial movements. "Recognition" might be a widespread but false belief. Even when they are universal, folk beliefs need not be correct. It might not be wise for me to argue that any specific current folk belief is false, but it should be easy to see that widespread folk and even scientific beliefs of the past were false. Consider the belief, probably once universal, that the sun rises and sets on a stable earth or the belief that physiognomy reveals character. Consider the initial clash between common sense and scientific theories-such as the conception of space and time in modern physics, the age of the earth in geology, or the evolution of life in biology. A review of all the evidence potentially bearing on the universality thesis is beyond the scope of this article. I chose instead to focus on the evidence that has convinced past reviewers. Statements of the universality thesis found in journals, chapters, and textbooks are often followed by references to secondary sources. My review of this topic therefore began with secondary sources (Ekman, 1972 (Ekman, , 1973 Ekmanetal., 1972;Ekman&Oster, 1979; Izard, 1971 ; plus the more recent reviews listed in Table 1 ) from whom I extracted citations of primary evidence for universality. Their emphasis was clearly on modern cross-cultural judgment studies, which are therefore the topic of my review. By modern, I refer to studies beginning with Ekman et al. (1969) . I excluded pre-1969 articles because Izard (1971) and reviewed them in detail, often coming to conclusions different from those of previous reviewers and of the authors of the original articles. More recent reviews often ignored the earlier studies or cited the interpretations offered by Izard (1971) and . Further review of these disputed studies seemed less useful than a critical examination of more recent ones. The principal limitation of my review is the focus on judgment studies. As implied by Oster et al.'s (1989) argument cited earlier, evidence that all "observers see the same emotions in the same faces" (i.e., the cross-cultural judgment studies, p. 114) has been taken as evidence for the entire universality thesis. Judgment data are offered to support the emotional meaning of facial behavior (e.g., Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988) . In the following passage, Ekman (1980) captured the importance of the judgment study: "Definitive data are now available on the quescross-cultural studies: Do the photographs of facial expressions typically used represent spontaneous, naturally occurring facial actions? tion of universality" (p. 93). "The judgment study of the face ... is the method employed in all but one of the experiments which have finally settled the issue of universality of facial expression" (p. 96). I review studies of modern, literate cultures next and studies of isolated, illiterate cultures in a later section. For literate cultures, the widely quoted high "recognition" scores came from eight studies. Different studies included slightly different lists of basic emotions, but all had six emotions in common. All results concerning these common six are listed in Table 2 , separately for 20 Western (Europeans plus English, Spanish, or Portugese speakers in North or South America) and 11 non-Western (Asian and African) samples. "Recognition scores," which are the percentage of subjects who agreed with prediction, were greater than that to be expected by chance for each type of facial expression in each study. The expression of "happiness" achieved the highest averages, with a median of 96.4% in Western and 89.2% in non-Western cultures. The expression of "surprise" achieved the second highest, with a median of 87.5% in Western and 79.2% in non-Western cultures. Among the expressions for negative emotions ("sadness," "disgust," "anger," and "fear"), the range of medians was from 77.5% to 82.6% in Western and from 63.0% to 76.0% in nonWestern cultures. Three further studies have been cited but were not included in Table 2 . First, Winkelmayer, Exline, Gottheil, and Paredes (1978) asked American, British, and Mexican observers to judge facial expressions of "happiness," "anger," and "sadness." Percentages of agreement were not reported for the emotions separately, however, and therefore were not reported in Table 2 . The overall mean recognition score was 39.3%, whereas the figure to be expected by chance alone would have been 33%. The second study (Ekman & Friesen, 1986 ) concerned a single emotion, contempt. Across 10 cultures, recognition averaged 75%. Results for individual cultures were not reported and therefore are not listed in Table 2 . The basic result was subsequently replicated in six more cultures (Ekman & Heider, 1988; Matsumoto, 1992b) . Although Ekman and Friesen's (1986) 6 Various kinds of additional evidence were cited: naturalistic observation of facial movements in various cultures (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1972; Ekman, 1980) ; laboratory observation of facial movements of members of two different cultures (Ekman, 1972) ; correlation of facial movement with self-reports of emotion (Ekman, Friesen, & Anoli, 1980; but see Fridlund, 1991 a); observation of facial communication in infants (Izard &Malatesta, 1987; but see Camras, 1992; Nelson, 1987; Oster, Hegley, & Nagel, 1992) ; observation of facial movements in children born blind (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1972; Goodenough, 1932; Thompson, 1941) , and studies of the accuracy of judgments based on observation of facial movements (Ekman, 1982) . Altogether, such studies suggested, to me, support for the first proposition listed above (that specific patterns of facial movement occur in all human beings), but not for the other three. For the purposes of this article, I assumed that the first proposition was essentially correct. This assumption left open the meaning of facial behavior. claim created controversy (Izard & Haynes, 1988; Ricci-Bitti, Brighetti, Garotti, & Boggi-Cavallo, 1989; Russell, 199la, 1991 c), Ekman and his colleagues defended their claim (Ekman & Friesen, 1988; Ekman et al., 1991a Ekman et al., , 1991b Matsumoto, 1992b) . The third study provided another Chinese sample. Chan (1985) showed nine of Izard's (1977) photographs of facial expressions to 124 medical students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The study was conducted both in Chinese and English. Subjects were allowed to select one or two words from the forced-choice list; the judgment was scored as correct if either choice was as predicted. These data were not included in Table  2 because this criterion for recognition was more lenient than that used in the studies included there. Chan's obtained recognition scores were "happiness" 97.6, "surprise" 66.9, "sadness" 61.3, "anger" 96.0, "disgust" 62.1, and "fear" 66.9. Some further judgment studies exist, but for various reasons they were not cited in the secondary sources as evidence for the universality thesis. 7 Some failed to report sufficient information 7 Undoubtedly, unpublished data also exist. M. K. Mandal (personal communication, March 12, 1993) gathered unpublished data from 100 subjects in India, who were shown Ekman and Friesen's (1976) standardized set of photographs. The experiment was conducted in English. The results for the normative American sample and for the Indian sample, respectively, were 98.5 and 87.0 for "happiness," 92.3 and 75.1 for FACIAL EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTION 109 to be useful. Some were criticized for their sample of facial expressions (Matsumoto, 1992a); for example, two (Ciiceloglu, 1970; Kilbride & Yarczower, 1976) used line drawings effaces and are not reviewed here. Nevertheless, two sets of studies are useful. First is additional data from Africa. Only two samples from Africa are shown in Table 2 , and both suggest a noticeable discrepancy between African and Western results. Izard (1971) found an overall recognition score of 49.0% from a sample of Africans tested in France. This score contrasts with 83.4% in his normative, American group. He excluded the African data from most of his analyses (because the subjects were not tested in their native language). Ducci, Arcuri, W/Georgis, and Sineshaw (1982) obtained an overall recognition score of 51.9% from Ethiopians (no normative figure was reported, but the set of photographs was supplied by Ekman and Friesen). To estimate the reliability of this African-Western difference, it is helpful to look at additional data, which appear to replicate the difference even when the Africans were tested in their native language. Wolfgang and Cohen (1988) obtained an overall recognition score of 48% from Ethiopians (in contrast to 75% in their normative, Canadian sample). Kilbride and Yarczower (1980) obtained an overall recognition score of 62.5% from Zambians (in contrast to 94.2% in their normative, American group). Kilbride and Yarczower (1983) provided further data on Zambians. Although they did not report overall recognition scores and their set of facial expressions has been criticized (Matsumoto, 1992a), their results were informative. Given the same set of facial stimuli, which included both American and Zambian posers, Americans obtained significantly higher recognition scores than did Zambians. Second is additional data from Japan. Izard (1971) and Ekman et al. (1987) had found a similarity between American and Japanese recognition for the hypothesized expressions of nonnegative emotions, but a discrepancy on the "fear," "disgust," and "anger" expressions. Fortunately, three more studies have recently been published (Matsumoto, 1992a; Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988 . Table 3 combines the earlier results, seen in  Table 2 , with the new ones. The additional data showed a similar pattern to the old. Moreover, Matsumoto (1992a) found a statistically significant interaction between culture and type of facial expression. I now turn to a critical analysis of these studies. The results have already been summarized in Tables 2 and 3 . The methods used are summarized in Table 4 . The similarity of method across studies allows me to consider the studies as a whole rather than individually. For convenience, I call the combination of typical features the standard method. In the remainder of this section, I discuss first the results and then the individual features of the standard method. In doing so, I do not dispute the formal statistical finding in each study of an association between facial expression and emotion label. I do not seek one feature of method that is a fatal flaw. Rather, in the light of this discussion, "surprise," 88.6 and 73.0 for "sadness," 87.8 and 73.3 for "fear," 92.3 and 75.1 for "disgust," and 88.9 and 74.5 for "anger." the evidence as a whole is later evaluated against the criteria of ecological, convergent, and internal validity. I focus on four questions: First, are recognition scores uniform across cultures? Second, are the results generalizable beyond the specific experimental context in which they were obtained? Third, is recognition in terms of specific emotions or broader clusters of emotions? And fourth, how easy is recognition, and is it possible that recognition scores were inflated by the method itself? One focus is thus the precise magnitude of the recognition scores. Evidence that agreement is lower than expected, even if still above chance, allows various alternative explanations. For example, agreement with prediction would be low but still greater than chance if observers could simply distinguish positive expressions from negative ones. Higher, but still less than perfect, agreement is predicted by Schlosberg's (1952 Schlosberg's ( , 1954 Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954 ) model or its more modern variants (Russell & Bullock, 1987). Recognition scores from the eight studies of Table 2 were analyzed with a two-factor analysis of variance with a betweenwithin design. Each sample was treated as a single case (n = 20 for Western cultures and n = 11 for non-Western cultures). Culture (Western or non-Western) was a between-subjects factor. Type of expression ("happy," "surprise," "sadness," "disgust," "anger," or "fear") was a within-subject factor. Adjustments for lack of sphericity were used where needed. The main effect of culture was significant, F(\, 29) = 15.36, p < .001. The main effect of type of expression was significant, F(5, 145) = 25.57, p < .001. Their interaction was also significant, F(5, 145) = 2.39, p < .05. A simple effects analysis pursued the interaction effect obtained. When experimentwise alpha level was determined by Bonferroni's method, there were no significant effects of culture for "happy," surprise," and "sadness" expressions, but there were for "disgust," F(l, 104) = 9.17, p < .01, "anger," F( 1, 104) = 18.94, p < .001, and "fear," F(\, 104)= 12.55,p<. 001, expressions. A discriminant function analysis of the recognition scores showed significant, x 2 0> N = 31) = 15.99, p < .001, discrimination based on culture. Twenty-seven of the 31 groups were classified correctly. Four were misclassified. The Argentine and Estonian samples were misclassified with the non-Western set. (Estonian is a non-Indo-European language, and Estonia was a member of the Soviet Union at the time of the study.) The Turkish sample and McAndrew's (1986) Malaysian sample were misclassified with the Western set. Turkey straddles Asia and Europe and could have been included with the Western set. McAndrew's Malaysian sample were living in the United States. Bonferroni matched-sample t tests with overall alpha set at .05 were used to explore the reliability of differences between recognition scores for the different types of expression. Among the Western samples, "happy" differed from each of the others; "surprise" differed from each of the others, except "disgust." Among the non-Western samples, "happy" differed from "disgust," "anger," and "fear." A parallel set of analyses was conducted for the Americanno JAMES A. RUSSELL Japanese comparisons shown in Table 3 . In this analysis, the number of samples was even smaller (n = 6 within each culture), but the statistical results were similar. There were significant main and interactive effects in the main analysis: For culture, F( 1, 10) = 54.00, p < .001; for type of expression, F(5, 50) = 24.89,;? < .001; and for their interaction, F(5, 145) = 4.50, p < .01. The simple effects analysis did not yield significant effects of culture for the "happy," "surprise," or "sad" expressions, but did for "disgust," F( 1, 21) = 12.21, p < .01; "anger," F(1, 21) = 19.40, p < .001; and "fear," F( 1, 21) = 38.49, p < .001. The discriminant function analysis was significant, % 2 ( 1, N = 12) = 12.00, p < .001, and correctly classified all 12 samples on the basis of culture. Bonferroni matched-sample t tests with overall alpha set at .05 were used to explore the reliability of differences among recognition scores for the different types of expression. Among the American samples, "happy" differed from each of the others except "sadness" and "anger." Among the Japanese samples, "happy" and "surprise" did not differ from each other, but each of them did differ from the rest. "Fear" also differed from "sad." The analyses of the Japanese-American comparisons from Table 3 nicely complement the analyses of the more general comparisons of Table 2 . Unlike the latter, the Japanese-American comparisons equate the number of samples, the stimuli, and other details of method. Altogether, the finding of reliable differences due to culture, to type of expression, and to their interaction appears to be robust. These analyses do not challenge the original researchers' conclusion that recognition scores are greater than chance, but they do show that recognition scores are not uniform. Recognition varies in a reliable and systematic fashion. The scores on the "happy expression" provide a baseline comparison of these observers' performance on the task per se. Therefore, reliable differences from this baseline in scores for other expressions in different cultures require examination. In all studies of literate cultures described in Tables 2 and 3 , subjects were students: high school students in two samples and college students in the rest. Wolfgang and Cohen (1988) tested a sample of 96 volunteers from Central and South America living in Canada. The stimuli consisted of 40 posed facial expressions from a standardized set. Recognition scores varied with education level: Overall recognition was 81% from those with a university education, 66% from those with a high school education, and 43% from those with a primary school education. These differences were statistically significant. There is also a question of how much the studies of Tables 2  and 3 provided a strict test of universality. The non-Western cultures included often had extensive contact with the West. The cross-cultural aspect of the studies is mitigated by the possibility that in these non-Western societies, students receive (1982) compared urban with rural high school students in Ethiopia. The urban students were in nearly continuous contact with Western culture, whereas the rural students were relatively isolated. Other than contact, most other relevant factors, such as age and education, were similar in the two groups. All subjects spoke Amharic and were equally familiar with the emotion terms used. Recognition scores were reliably greater for urban than for rural students. For the more recent studies, the use of college students also raises an even more troubling possibility: The universality thesis or even the specific hypothesis proposed by Izard (1971) or Ekman (1972) could have been taught to some of the subjects who were used to test that thesis. Through their coursework or general reading, college students might have learned which specific expressions had been hypothesized to be associated with which emotion. Books on drawing techniques describe how to draw a facial expression for each emotion (Faigin, 1990; Peck, 1987) . Popularized books teach students how to recognize specific emotions from specific facial expressions (Ekman & Friesen, 1975 ). Darwin's (1872/1965) book might have been encountered in a psychology or biology class. The extent to which student subjects in each study were trained in the universality thesis is difficult to estimate. This problem would be greater if the subjects were drawn from psychology courses. For students enrolled in psychology courses up to the late 1970s, their textbook might have taught that situational information dominates over facial information in the judgment of emotion. After that time, some popular introductory psychology textbooks began to include material supporting the universality thesis, some with photographs of the hypothesized universal facial expressions (Braun & Linder, 1979; Kagan & Havemann, 1976; London, 1978) . Table 2 shows no noticeable shift in recognition scores around the late 1970s, and only the Ducci et al. (1982) study directly supports these musings about training and cultural influence. Still, no evidence rules them out. In any future studies, the relevant background and training of the subjects should be examined and reported. As acknowledged by Izard (1977) and Ekman (1980) , the question of cross-cultural universality is best answered by the study of cultures more isolated from Western influence than those of Tables 2 and 3.  JAMES A. RUSSELL Psychological theory and research are unequivocal in proclaiming the dependency of a response to a given stimulus on other stimuli presented. This principle applies to responses as simple as recordings in single cells and to responses as complex as global judgments of happiness, morality, or beauty (Helson, 1964; Parducci, 1965; Russell & Lanius, 1984) . In accord with this general principle, the judgment of a given facial expression has consistently been found to depend on what other faces are presented (Manis, 1967 (Manis, , 1971 Russell, 199la; Russell & Fehr, 1987; Tanaka-Matsumi, Nelson, Attivissimo, & D'Urso, 1993; Thayer, 1980a Thayer, , 1980b . Judgments of expressions claimed to be signals of basic emotions are no less relative: When particular stimulus contexts were created, the "contempt" expression was judged as disgust, the "surprise" expression was judged as a surprise-fear blend, and the "anger" expression was judged as sad. In addition, expressions claimed to be neutral have been judged to be happy when seen embedded in one stimulus set and as sad when seen embedded in another. The question then is how much the results summarized in Tables 2 and 3 depend on the particular stimulus context created by the experiment. Stimulus context might have exerted an influence through previewing, within-subject design, and order of presentation. In some studies (e.g., Winkelmayer et al., 1978) , the subjects were first shown the entire set of facial expressions, after which each stimulus was redisplayed for the subjects to rate. In Izard's (1971) studies, 9 of 13 cultural samples performed the recognition task without previewing the photographs. Four of the groups were shown the expression photographs in a free-labeling task before the emotion recognition task. In Boucher and Carlson's (1980) study, observers saw the full set of expressions five times. Whether a preview of any kind was offered in other studies was not specified. Winkelmayer et al. (1978) reported that a preview was necessary for their subjects to achieve a reliable degree of agreement. Presenting subjects with the full range of facial expressions highlights both similarities within expression type and differences between expression types. Presenting an equal number of broad smiles, wrinkled noses, sneers, and so on further highlights similarities and differences. All studies in Tables 2 and 3 used a within-subject design: Each subject was asked to judge the entire set of facial expressions within a relatively short period of time. A within-subject design creates the same kind of problem as does previewing. It invites a more direct comparison between the various facial expressions than would be available in a between-subjects design (or in everyday encounters with facial expressions). Responding to a set of stimuli creates a series of complex assimilation and contrast effects. Results from a within-subject design need to be verified with a between-subjects design. One attempt to do so failed: The facial expression published by Matsumoto and Ekman (1988) as a signal of contempt was judged as contempt in a within-subject design but was judged as disgust in a between-subjects design (Russell, 1991c) . According to Ekman and Friesen (1986) , a "contempt" expression is a unilateral raising and curling of the upper lip, and a "disgust" expression is a wrinkling of the nose. Seen separately (between-subjects design), these facial movements are both most typically labeled as disgust (Russell, 1991 c). But when both expressions are presented to the same subject (within-subject design), then the subject might feel called on to notice the difference between the two expressions and (especially when the response scale calls for a distinction between disgust and contempt) to assign different labels to them. That they do so in a consensual manner is still informative, but the point is that method appears to influence the results obtained. Of course, contempt is the least well established of the "basic" emotions and, as noted, has aroused the most controversy. (In addition, Ekman et al., 199 la, argued that the ecological validity of my [Russell, 1991c] finding had yet to be established. I agree but believe that the finding nevertheless has methodological implications.) Ekman et al. (1991b) recently revealed that "in our early studies (Ekman, 1972) we found unreliability in initial responses when subjects had to judge expressions. . . . We have found that subjects better understand what is expected of them after trying it a few times" (p. 294). Ekman et al. (1991b) reasoned that their subjects were initially unfamiliar with the task and that a few trials were required to understand the instructions. The high recognition scores for "happy" expressions in Table 2 speaks against this interpretation. Ekman's (1972) and Izard's (1971) theories would seem to predict that this would be an exceedingly simple task. (After all, the observer simply had to select one word from a short list for universal, biologically based signals.) In any case, if subjects must be trained on the task per se, then they should receive that training with neutral material (such as matching names to color patches), so that training does not influence the results of the experiment. The relevant point is that an initial response constitutes a betweensubjects design and that this passage from Ekman et al. (1991 b) therefore reveals that recognition scores were not as high (were not as reliable) in a between-subjects as in a within-subject design. There are several more indications. Tanaka-Matsumi et al. (1993) obtained a recognition score of 44.2% for Ekman and Friesen's (1976) "sad" expression with a between-subjects design. Recognition of the "sad" expression rose to 58.3% when it was preceded by a single "happy" expression and to 72.1% when it was preceded by a single "anger" expression. They obtained a recognition score of 41.7% for Ekman and Friesen's (1976) "anger" expression with a between-subjects design. Recognition rose to 53.1%, 66.7%, and 57.9% when it was preceded by a single "happy," "sad," or "surprised" expression. Finally, I (Russell, 1993b) compared a between-subjects design with the combination of preview plus within-subject design. Although there was only one example of each expression and the dependent measure was free label rather than forced choice, the results (shown in 2 was used to assess the effect of design, separately for each facial expression. The dependent measure was a free label. Data are described by Russell (1993). For "contempt," expected frequency was too low to calculate a chi-squared. a Label is that provided by Matsumoto and Ekman (1988) . *p<.05. **p<.01. In all, what little evidence we have suggests that something about the within-subject design produces higher recognition scores than would a between-subjects design. I believe that the size of the effect varies with the type of expression. It was large for the "contempt" expression but was small for the six types of facial expressions included in Table 2 (given the other aspects of method). Nevertheless, the within-subject design, like previewing, may have increased the recognition scores there a bit. For a within-subject design, order of stimulus presentation becomes an issue. Order should be varied systematically, or a separate random order should be created for each subject. However, the studies listed in Tables 2 and 3 sometimes used one or two orders of presentation. Different subjects were thus not responding simply to a particular facial expression alone. Rather, they were responding to that expression embedded within an identical context consisting of the preceding series of other facial expressions. Giving different subjects the same order of presentation could inflate the amount of agreement among them. Inflation of the amount of agreement does not necessarily translate into increased agreement with prediction (indeed, it could do the opposite). Like the within-subject design itself, order of presentation alone challenges validity only insofar as increased agreement tends toward the hypothesis. Therefore, only in combination with other factors already sufficient to produce very high agreement with prediction could order of presentation exaggerate that agreement. Exposure to the entire stimulus set, through previewing or a within-subject design, confronts the subjects with what might appear to them to be a puzzle: how to assign, for example, seven labels to seven types of facial expression. If so, subjects might be guided in providing their responses or might even form a rough idea of the experimental hypothesis. Thus, stimulus presentation might account for some part (although not a large part) of the results generally offered in support of the universality thesis: Subjects give the same label to expressions of the same type and different labels to expressions of different types. Of course, if the facial expressions were completely meaningless to the subject, then the puzzle would remain unsolvable. But if a subject already had a fair idea of their meaning (such as appropriate labels for some of the expressions; or whether the expressions were positive or negative; or their values on Schlosberg's, 1954, dimensions; or labels for several expressions learned from the textbook), then previewing, within-subject design, and constant order of presentation could inflate the amount of agreement with prediction on some or all of the expressions shown. The facial expressions shown to subjects were unrepresentative of the population of facial expressions. In all studies of Tables 2 and 3, the stimulus expressions were preselected and, for the most part, posed. The researchers naturally had reasons for this approach, and responses to preselected posed expressions could address some questions. However, it is also important to ask about the possible consequences of preselection and posing. A full understanding of emotion and facial expression would include information about unselected spontaneous expressions. The exact degree of preselection is difficult to specify, but it was extreme. Ekman and Friesen (1971) described selecting their stimuli from over 3,000 photographs. Some of these 3,000, in turn, had been gathered by previous researchers, with each probably culled from still others. Izard's (1971) selection procedure was complex, beginning with a pool of about 1,000 posed expressions to which new ones were added. Photographs were eliminated from the pool if they failed to satisfy Izard himself or the original poser or if they failed to achieve 70% agreement with prediction from a panel of 25 to 30 judges. All but one of the remaining studies listed in Table 2 used photographs supplied by Ekman and Friesen, although not necessarily the same ones. When the stimulus material is not so highly preselected, then recognition scores might not be as high. 8 Winkelmayer et al. (1978) used all of their stimuli and found considerably lower 8 Izard (personal communication, November 10, 1992) reported that 34 of the photographs excluded by his procedure were subsequently shown to American and French subjects with a procedure similar but not identical to the standard method: "The mean percentage agreement for [these excluded] expressions was 31%. This contrasts with the agreement of 80% or better for American and French subjects viewing the photographs selected for the cross-cultural research." American and French observers agreed in their modal response for 17 of the 34. JAMES A. RUSSELL agreement with prediction than did any of the studies in Table  2 , an average of 39.6% where chance would be 33.3%. Malatesta, Fiore, and Messina (1987) asked 14 elderly persons to pose facial expressions of happiness, fear, anger, sadness, and a neutral state. All 70 photographs (14 X 5) were then shown to 30 graduate students, who were given a forced-choice response scale. Overall, 41% of judgments were correct. This figure was influenced greatly by the happy poses, which were "almost always correct" (p. 65). With happy poses set aside, 28% of judgments were correct for the fear, anger, sadness, and neutral poses, where chance presumably would be 25%. All studies cited in Table 2 used mainly or entirely posed rather than spontaneous expressions. The universality thesis is not, at least not directly, about posed faces. Posed faces do not express the emotion of the poser, but what the poser chooses to pretend and in a manner most likely to be understood by the observer. According to the notion of display rules, voluntarily posed expressions are culturally influenced and have been said to originate in a different region of the brain than do spontaneous facial expressions (Rinn, 1984) . Posed expressions have been found to be more asymmetric than are spontaneous expressions (Skinner & Mullen, 1991) . Reuter-Lorenz and Davidson (1981) found that subjects could tell when some of the expressions shown were posed. Posed expressions might be exaggerated or stylized. The poses for each type of expression might be more similar to each other, and more discriminable from poses of other types of expression, than spontaneous expressions. Posed expressions can be useful to answer some questions, but concerns of ecological validity raise the question of whether observers recognize the emotion conveyed by spontaneously produced facial expressions. There is evidence that, at least in our culture, observers can accurately judge whether someone is feeling pleasant or unpleasant, or is in pleasant or unpleasant circumstances, on the basis of spontaneous facial expressions (Buck, Miller, & Caul, 1974; Buck, Savin, Miller, & Caul, 1972; Howell & Jorgenson, 1970; Nakamura, Buck, & Kenny, 1990) . Can observers go beyond a distinction between pleasant and unpleasant? Three studies have addressed this question. Ekman (1989). Ekman (1989) raised this question but cited only indirect evidence on the basis of a single, unpublished study. Emotion-inducing films were shown to 25 Japanese and 25 American viewers, whose faces were secretly videotaped. Specific facial movements such as smiling or lowering the brow were found on the videotapes in similar frequency in the two samples. Two segments from each videotape, one taken while the viewer watched a "neutral" travelogue and the other taken while the viewer watched a "stress" film (industrial accidents and the like), were then shown to a sample of judges. Judges were asked to guess whether the viewer was watching the travelogue or the stress film. According to Ekman (1972) , "about 60% of the judgments" (p. 243) were correct (chance would have yielded 50%). Ekman (1972) argued that these findings provide strong evidence in support of our position that there are universal facial expressions of emotions. . . . It is reasonable to expect that the judges would make [their judgments] by a reasoning process in which they judged facial behavior as showing a particular emotion, for example, disgust, and disgust as being an emotion which would be more likely to occur during a stress film than a neutral film. (p. 244) However, the small increase in accuracy might have been achieved without such reasoning. For example, judges might have interpreted facial expressions simply as positive or negative and guessed that negative expressions occurred during the stress film or positive expressions during the travelogue. Or the 60% accuracy might have been achieved with no reliance on facial expression at all. If the original viewers had, for example, averted their gaze more during the scenes of accidents than during the travelogue, then the judges might have exploited this difference. A test of Ekman's interpretation would require that judges agree on the specific emotional meaning of specific spontaneous facial expressions. Motley and Camden (1988). Candid photographs of the facial expressions of 4 subjects were taken while they participated in six elaborately plotted interpersonal exchanges, each designed to elicit a different emotion. That the anticipated emotions were actually elicited was checked by retrospective report and physiological recordings. The same 4 subjects then posed facial expressions for the same six emotions (happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness, and confusion). The resulting 48 photographs (6 spontaneous and 6 posed from each of 4 subjects) were then shown to 20 judges. For each photo, the judges were asked to select one emotion from a list of the six. For posed expressions, 81.4% of judgments were accurate, but for spontaneous expressions, 26.0% were. The difference was highly significant. Analysis of judgments of spontaneous expressions for individual emotions showed that judgments did not differ from random selection, except for happy expressions. Wagner, MacDonald, and Manstead (1986) . Wagner et al. (1986) videotaped the spontaneous facial expressions of persons viewing emotion-eliciting slides. The viewers indicated their response to each slide by selecting one of seven emotion words. Fifty-three j udges then attempted to guess the viewers' emotions from the videotape by selecting one of the same seven emotion words. From their analysis of the results, Wagner et al. (1986) concluded that overall accuracy was significantly greater than chance, although it was not impressive in absolute terms. Only happy, angry, and disgusted expressions were recognized at above-chance rates, (p. 737) I believe that their modest conclusion was overly optimistic. Their three significant recognition scores were 48.4% for "happiness," 22.69% for "disgust," and 12.67% for "anger." As their level of comparison (what they called chance), Wagner et al. (1986) used the percentage of times a given label was used overall-that is, its base rate. Thus, 12.67% correct for "anger" was considered significant because it was reliably greater than 8.27%, the base rate with which the word anger was selected across all stimuli. Given the forced-choice response format and the nonrepresentative sample of stimuli, I find this comparison level necessary but insufficient. (Thus, judges might not so FACIAL EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTION 115 Table 6 Responses to Negative Expressions From Wagner, MacDonald, and Manstead (1986) much have associated the label anger with facial expressions of "anger," as they did not find the word anger appropriate for smiles, for the wide open eyes of "surprise," and so on.) A more conservative approach would require judges to exceed not only base rate, but random choice. This is because observers could exceed base rate through a random process. For instance, imagine that for one type of facial expression, the judges had no idea whatsoever what emotion label to pick. If, on these trials only, judges in effect selected their responses blindfolded from a hat, then 14.3% of their responses (one out of seven) would be expected to be correct by chance alone. Return now to the three "significant" findings. Although happiness (48.4%) was well above this level of random choice, disgust (22.69%) was only somewhat above, and anger (12.67%) was slightly below. The obtained results cannot allow rejection of the possibility that subjects selected the words anger and disgust for the appropriate facial expressions as often as they did in a random process. (Wagner, 1993 , subsequently proposed more sophisticated ways of assessing recognition.) Even if performance exceeded both base rate and random choice, judges still might not associate specific facial expressions with specific emotions. Assume that the judges could tell positive from negative facial expressions reasonably well. This assumption is consistent with the markedly higher success on happiness both in this and in the Motley and Camden (1988) studies. In addition, other studies of spontaneous facial expressions show that judges can guess whether the eliciting circumstances were pleasant or unpleasant with accuracy greater than chance. The question then becomes whether judges discriminated among negative emotions-that is, beyond a positivenegative distinction. Wagner et al. (1986, Table 4). Part 2 converts those figures to percentages of negative responses. The simplest null hypothesis-that for these cases, choices among the four negative response alternatives were random-would predict that 25% of the responses in Part 2 would be correct. Overall, 27.1% of responses were correct. Percentages for "fear" and "anger" expressions fell below, "sad" and "disgust" expressions above, this level. The seemingly better performance on "sad" (29.6%) and "disgust" (40.1%) expressions can now be compared with the base rates. Note that across the rows, the modal response was sad to the "fear" expressions and was disgust to the "sad," "disgust," and "anger" expressions. There was no differential labeling of "sad" and "disgust" facial expressions but a greater willingness to use the labels sad and disgust. The label sad was not more likely to be used for the "sad" expression than for any other negative expression-indeed, less likely. The label disgust was applied equally often to the "disgust" and "sad" expressions. Conclusion. We have no cross-cultural studies of recognition of emotion from spontaneous facial expressions. Even in Western cultures, too few studies exist to draw firm conclusions. (Some earlier studies exist- Landis, 1924; Munn, 1940; Sherman, 1927 -which were reviewed by Izard, 1971.) The available studies demonstrate the need to consider carefully the criterion by wliich performance is evaluated (Wagner, 1993) . Apparently significant performance could be due to high base rate for specific labels, to random choice on certain trials, or to a positive-negative discrimination. (A further problem in these studies, to be discussed shortly, is their use of a forced-choice response format.) Beyond such factors, the available results (Motley & Camden, 1988; Wagner et al., 1986; Winkelmeyer et al., 1978) do not demonstrate a recognition of specific emotions from spontaneous facial expression. Conversely, the available studies do not allow us to conclude that the fault-if fault is the right word-lies in the observer. In these studies, the person feeling the emotion might not have produced any facial expression in the first place. A study reported by Ekman, Friesen, and Ancoli (1980) suggests that at least some of the difficulty may indeed have arisen at the encoding stage. Something is amiss in spontaneous communication, but it could be either an encoding or a decoding problem. Perhaps further information on this question could come from scoring the available records of spontaneous expressions with one of the objective facial scoring systems (Ekman & Friesen, 1982; Izard, 1983) . The results of Tables 2 and 3 were all derived from asking subjects to select one word from a prespecified list of emotions. For instance, a subject might have been asked to select one of the following : happy, sad, afraid, angry, surprised, disgust, or contempt. This type of forced-choice response format is a com-116 JAMES A. RUSSELL mon instrument in research on emotion and has been advocated as the method of choice in the study of facial expression, although other response formats have also been used. In this section, I first use a recent study to demonstrate that problems can arise when forced-choice format is used-quite different kinds of facial expressions can all be placed in the same emotion category, and one and the same expression can achieve consensus on quite different emotion categories, depending on the choices given to subjects. Then I examine two alternative methods of collecting subjects' responses: freely chosen labels and quantitative ratings. A forced-choice format clearly alerts the subject to the experimenter's expectation that the facial expression is to be interpreted in terms of emotion and even which emotions. After the first trial, the set of category choices is primed and might influence subsequent perception (Wyer & Srull, 1981) . Subjects were not given the option of saying none of the above or of choosing a nonemotion. For example, they were not allowed to gi\z frustration, seeing a friend, attending to something novel, or some other situational interpretation to the face. They were not allowed to describe the face as part of an instrumental responsesuch as threatening, staring, or avoiding. They were not given the option of choosing a more general emotional state, such as unhappy, distressed, or aroused. Oster, Hegley, and Nagel (1992) criticized judgment studies of babies' faces for lacking just such nonspecific alternatives. Given the list of options generally used, a forced-choice format is at odds with the properties of the emotion concepts presented (Russell, 1989b; . For instance, forcing the observer to choose exactly one option treats the set of options as mutually exclusive, which they are not: Subjects place the same facial expression (or emotion of another or their own emotion) into more than one emotion category. Forced choice treats each option as an either-or (present-absent) choice, which they are not: Subjects reliably rate different facial expressions as belonging to a given emotion category to different degrees. Potential problems stemming from forced choice have not been widely discussed in connection with the study of facial expression. If observers find on the prespecified list the precise emotion label they have already spontaneously thought of, then no serious problem arises. However, consider the situation in which the list of response options fails to include a label for the observer's spontaneous categorization. It might be thought that such a situation would be immediately obvious because it would result in idiosyncratic and thus random responses. Such an outcome is possible, but-as will be shown-not inevitable. A small study recently showed that forced choice could lead to consensus on results rather different from those reported in Table 2 (Russell, I993a). The "wrong" expressions were categorized as a particular emotion when a different forced-choice response format was used. By wrong, I mean not simply expressions slightly different from the prototype. I mean expressions previously claimed as expressing fundamentally different emotions: the "sad" expression categorized as fear, the "fear" expression categorized as surprise, and so on. There were 12 conditions-or demonstrations. In each condition, subjects were shown one photograph of a facial expression from the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion (JACFEE) set, developed by Matsumoto and Ekman (1988) . The subject was then asked to select one emotion label from a list of options. (Slightly different methods were used for the first 6 and last 6 conditions; five options versus six and the placement of the predicted option.) In each condition, the predicted option was not a synonym for the emotion name supplied by Matsumoto and Ekman (1988) but was predicted from a circular model of the judgment space for emotions (Russell, 1980; Russell & Fehr, 1987) . The options available in each condition are shown in Table 7 , in which the predicted option is underlined. In the first condition, for example, the options were happiness, surprise, contempt, fear, and interest. The subjects were shown an "anger" expression and were predicted to select contempt. The percentage of subjects selecting the various options in each condition is also shown in Table 7 . Of course, some response must be modal, but the results were not quantitatively different from those seen in Table 2 . The range of the 12 modal responses was 46.3% to 96.3%, the median of which was 76.8%. In each condition, responses were far from what would be expected by random assortment, and the predicted option was the modal choice in each case. In the first condition, subjects were shown an "anger" expression and were found to categorize it as contempt-at least 76% did. This figure can be compared with previous results in which the same type of expression was categorized as anger. For example, Ekman and Friesen (1986) found that 73% of their subjects categorized "anger" expressions as anger. In Table 2 , the median percentage of agreement for "anger" expressions was 81.2% for Western subjects and 63.0% for non-Western subjects. Or the present result can be compared with Ekman and Friesen's (1986) claim that a very different expression, a unilateral lip curl, is "unique to contempt" (p. 159): The percentage of their subjects selecting contempt for the lip curl averaged 75% across 10 cultures. In a subsequent condition, the "anger" expression was labeled as frustration and, in another condition, as disgust. The "disgust" expression was labeled contempt in one condition and anger in another, the "sad" expression as contempt in one and as fear in another, the "contempt" expression as boredom in one and as disgust in another, the "fear" expression as surprise, and the "surprise" expression as fear. In no case did subjects select a category label at random, and the use of the labels therefore implied no idiosyncratic selection. Forced choice could yield random selection, of course, but the list of options used here was carefully constructed to allow the modal response to be predicted. Even so, it should be clear that these data do not show that the "anger" expression really expresses contempt, that the "surprise" expression really expresses fear, and so on. Nor do these results even say that observers necessarily attributed contempt to the "anger" and "disgust" expressions, and so on. If that is so, then the same reason-FACIAL EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTION 117 Note. Predicted response option is underlined. For each condition, a separate chi-squared test x 2 (N = 80) examined whether response labels were chosen at random. For conditions with five choices, the degrees of freedom were 4. For conditions with six choices, the degrees of freedom were 5. For each condition, this null hypothesis was rejected at alpha of .001. * Label is that given the photograph by Matsumoto and Ekman (1988). ing shows that the results of Table 2 cannot be used to say that the various expressions really express the emotions claimed in those studies or that the subjects necessarily attributed those emotions to those expressions. The method in this study is not advocated for general purposes. One anonymous reviewer commented that the response format used here was "as rigged" against the traditional hypothesis as the traditional format was "rigged in support." The purpose of this study was to expose potential problems. Given other options, subjects would have chosen other category labels. Given still other options, they would not be able to agree on one label as best. Thus, given different lists of options, forced choice can yield anything from random choice to a consensus, even on, from what researchers have generally concluded, the wrong answer. 9 Therefore, consensus achieved through forced choice need not point to subjects' unique response. The question might be raised regarding whether the odd results here were due to the list of response options being overly restrictive. In general, any short list, including the ones used in the studies of Table 2 , should be suspected of being overly restrictive. The results presented showed that the occurrence of near consensus was no evidence to the contrary. The question might be raised whether the odd results here were due to the list of response options failing to include the "correct" option. One problem is that we would need independent evidence to know the "correct" label, and such evidence is lacking for the studies of Table 2 . These results raise the question of whether observers would still prefer the "correct" (predicted) label when plausible alternatives were available. For example, shown Matsumoto and Ekman's (1988) "anger" expression, would observers select anger when the options were anger, determination, frustration, hostility, hatred, jealousy, or pain! This question is relevant to whether observers interpret facial expressions in terms of specific emotion categories or broader clusters and was explored in a final study by Russell (199 3a). The study used two examples of Matsumoto and Ekman's (1988) "anger" expression and the seven response options listed above. These seven options had been chosen to be close to anger in Russell and Fehr's (1987) judgment space for emotions. Still, a semantic analysis leaves the word anger as the only option that unequivocally denotes the emotion of anger. Hostility, hatred, and jealousy refer to emotions qualitatively different from anger, according to Johnson-Laird and Oatley's (1989) semantic analysis. Pain refers to a complex sensation or perception rather than to a prototypical emotion. Frustration and determination refer to conditions of having a goal blocked and the resolve to do something. The results are shown in Table 8 . The two photographs yielded somewhat different profiles-an important result itself because the photographs were predicted by Matsumoto and Ekman (1988) to signal the same emotion. Anger was not the modal choice for either expression. In summary, forced choice can produce apparently contradictory results. For some facial expressions and some circumstances, subjects can consensually pick different emotion labels for the same expression. The universality thesis cannot be demonstrated solely through forced choice, and corroboration must 9 Izard (personal communication, November 10, 1992) rightly pointed out that forced-choice format alone could not guarantee consensus. He pointed to unpublished data (see Footnote 8) on facial expressions that failed his selection criteria for inclusion in his set. Even with forced-choice response format, the mean percentage agreement on these photographs was 31%. JAMES A. RUSSELL be obtained with other response formats. In the next section, I examine two alternatives: freely chosen labels and quantitative ratings. If recognition of emotion is easy and in terms of separate discrete emotion categories, then a list of emotions supplied by a researcher should not be necessary for recognition to occur. An observer's freely given response should reveal that recognition. However, when observers are given freedom to choose their own label, they don't always specify an emotion. This result was obtained by Darwin (1872 Darwin ( /1965 when he asked over 20 persons to comment on still photographs. Darwin did not report the details of his results, but Frijda (1953) repeated this openended approach and found a variety of responses. The majority of responses did not mention emotions at all, but rather situations: "She looks as if she is looking at a small child playing." Another subject said that the person in the photograph appeared "as if looking at something with fixed attention, a game or something, tense, two cars which almost get into collision, but nothing happens. Then she says, 'Gosh, who would do anything so stupid!'" (Frijda, 1953, p. 314). Of course, these respondents might have used such situational descriptions to convey an emotional interpretation. But some might not have. Subsequent "free label" studies have been less free. They required subjects to restrict their response to a word or two and told the subject that the word or two should describe an emotion. Of the five studies that obtained free labels, I discuss four here (Boucher & Carlson, 1980; Izard, 1971; Russell, 1991c; Russell, Suzuki, & Ishida, in press) and one more (Sorenson, 1975 (Sorenson, , 1976 in a later section. Izard (1971). Izard (1971) obtained freely chosen labels from American, English, French, and Greek college students for 32 still photographs of eight different types of facial expression. These same students then provided the forced-choice judgments already cited in Table 2 . (The degree of overlap in results from the two judgment tasks was not reported.) Recognition scores resulting from the two response formats are shown in Table 9 for two of the samples. Similar results were obtained from the remaining two samples. Izard (1971) first told his subjects that the photographs were of people "who were trying to express an emotion. Some of the people tried to express a certain emotion; others tried to express another emotion, others still another, etc." (p. 268). Instructions then asked the subject to "decide which one emotion is expressed most strongly" (p. 268). Despite these instructions, some of the labels that subjects produced did not refer to an emotion (e.g., deliberating, observation, clowning, smile, about to cry, bad news, skepticism, and sneer). How many such responses occurred was not reported. Izard reported the responses I just listed because he considered them to be correct, and we do not know the nature of the responses (about 47% of the total) not counted as correct. Ignoring words given by only 1 subject, Izard still found 224 different words or phrases produced (at least twice) for the eight types of expression. Izard therefore devised a scoring key in which, for example, 8 of the words were considered correct for fear, 28 for joy, and so on (the number correct for each emotion is given in Table 9 ). In all, 141 different words or phrases were scored as correct for the 8 emotions. Not all words that were considered correct for a given emotion were synonyms (e.g., distress, loneliness, pain, pity, and worry were considered correct for the "sad" expression; Izard's term for this expression was distress, but distress was considered a synonym for sadness). As noted, among the correct responses were also words not denoting emotions (laugh, smile, clowning, and sees something pleasant for "joy"; bad news and crying for "sadness"; smirk and sneer for "disgust/contempt"; revenge for "anger"; repentance for "shame"). The scoring method undoubtedly reflected the subjects' responses, but an issue that arose from the scoring was what version of the universality thesis the obtained results supported. It was not clear how these results supported Izard's FACIAL EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTION 119 contention that recognition occurred in terms of "specific emotion categories" rather than Woodworth's (1938) broad clusters. The results were not described fully. For example, the frequency with which specific labels were chosen was not reported, and it was therefore not clear whether the modal response for the proposed facial expression of "sadness/distress" was distress, sadness, loneliness, worry or what. Nonetheless, the results that were reported showed several clear trends. First, no marked differences appeared that were due to culture or language. Second, although a majority of free-label responses (about 53% overall) were considered correct, a large minority (from 42.3% of American responses to 48.1% of Greek responses) were considered incorrect. Third, recognition scores from free labeling were lower than from forced choice for every type of facial expression. Fourth, the difference between forced choice and free labeling varied with the type of expression. "Joy" replicated well; "shame" replicated poorly; and the other types of expression fell in between. There was a statistically significant main effect due to expression type (emotion, in Izard's, 1971, terms) for the correctness of free-label responses. Boucher and Carlson (1980) . Boucher and Carlson (1980) obtained both forced-choice (six options) and free-label responses from the same subjects, 30 Malays. Observers were shown facial expressions posed by Americans and Malays. With forced choice, the overall mean recognition score was 68.8% on the American and 60.0% on the Malay facial expressions. These figures were lower than had been obtained with the normative group of American subjects but were statistically significant for each emotion. The free-label data were not described fully, but Boucher and Carlson (1980) did report that expressions for each emotion, except "fear," obtained recognition scores greater than chance and that free label had resulted in "an apparent lower level of accuracy" (p. 274) than had resulted from the forced choice. Thus, the recognition scores must have been lower than 60.0% to 68.8% but significantly greater than zero, except for the "fear" expression. It is therefore impossible to say how well the results supported the conclusion of high recognition. In this analysis, as in Izard's (1971) , a response was considered correct if it was one of a set of words or phrases Boucher and Carlson considered similar to the label for the target emotion. Responses considered correct were not specified, and so it is impossible to say if the results more supported recognition in terms of specific emotions or broad clusters. The degree to which the results from the free-label format replicated those from the forced-choice format varied with the type of expression. Boucher and Carlson (1980) asked how often the free label corresponded to the same subject's subsequently given forced choice to the same face (regardless of its correctness, i.e., of what emotion the poser intended). The freely chosen label was considered equivalent to the forced-choice response if it fell in the cluster of related terms. The proportion of forced-choice responses that coincided with freely chosen labels was as follows: happy 89.9%, surprise 60.7%, anger 60.4%, sad 47.7%, disgust 39.7%, and fear 1. 1%. Russell (199Ic). In neither of the studies just reviewed were
Emotion recognition studies based on facial expression analysis often take a categorical approach, where a label from a set of six purported basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) is assigned to a pattern of facial movements REF ).
Is there universal recognition of emotion from facial expression? A review of the cross-cultural studies
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