Recognition of Facial Expressions: Past, Present, and Future Challenges

Abstract

Sender’s facial expressions are an inextricable combination of affective information and social signals aimed at influencing receivers’ behavior. This chapter deals with how receivers attribute meanings to the senders’ facial expressions. First, we review the findings of the most important corpus of literature in this field, on the so-called recognition of emotion in facial expressions. After discussing the conceptual problems behind the terms “recognition” and “expression”, we summarize the ongoing debate about the universal recognition of basic emotions from both posed and spontaneous facial expressions. In the next sections, we discuss some of the lessons that can be drawn from field studies in isolated societies.