The Face Knows No Borders — Or Does It?

From the reading: The Face Knows No Borders — Or Does It?

In 1967, the American psychologist Paul Ekman flew to the highlands of Papua New Guinea with a folder of photographs and a hypothesis that would reshape how scientists think about human emotion. The Fore people he visited had almost no contact with Western media. Yet when Ekman showed them pictures of faces expressing happiness, fear, and disgust, they identified each emotion with remarkable consistency. His conclusion — that a core set of facial expressions is biologically universal — became one of the most cited findings in psychology. For decades, it provided a tidy foundation for the growing field of emotional intelligence: if faces told the same story everywhere, learning to read them was a transferable skill.