Angry, sad or happy - it's all in the eye of the beholder A
smile and a frown mean the same thing everywhere - or so say
many anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists, who for
more than a century have argued that all humans express basic
emotions the same way. But a study of people's perceptions of
computer-generated faces suggests that facial expressions may
not be universal and that our culture strongly shapes the way we
read and express emotions. The hypothesis that facial
expressions convey the same meaning the world over goes all the
way back to Charles Darwin. In his 1872 book, The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, the famed naturalist identified
six basic emotional states: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust,
anger and sadness. If facial expressions are just cultural
traits, passed down through the generations by imitation, their
meanings would have diverged, he argued. A smile would signal
happiness for some and disgust for others. But that's not what
he found, based on his correspon