A facial expression results from one or more motions or positions of the muscles of the face. They are closely associated with our emotions. Charles Darwin noted in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal:
...the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.
In the mid-20th century most anthropologists believed that facial expressions were entirely learned and could therefore differ among cultures, but studies (eventually with people of the Papua New Guinea highlands who had not been in contact with the outside world) have supported Darwin's belief to a large degree, particularly for expressions of anger, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt and happiness. Research has also shown that consciously making expressions can induce the corresponding emotion.
Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication, and can be voluntary or involuntary. Most people's success rate at reading emotions from facial expression is only a little over 50 percent. Microexpressions, brief flashes of a facial expression, are likely to be involuntary and unconscious, and most people do not learn to read them at all. Recognizing facial expressions uses some of the same brain systems as face recognition.
Facial gestures can communicate information on their own, such as a facial shrug to express "I don't know" to another's query.
The basis set of facial postures has been designed so that a specific location in affect space specifies the relative contributions of the prototype postures in order to produce a net facialexpression that faithfully corresponds to the active "emotion".
Second, it lends clarity to the facialexpression since the robot can only be in a single affective state at a time (by our choice), and hence can only express a single state at a time.
If human facialexpressions are generated by biologically given "affect programs", one would expect these programs to operate automatically by eliciting facial muscle reactions spontaneously and independently of any conscious process.
In a study conducted on 120 students, Dimberg and his research team measured the facial muscle activity in the zogomatic major (involved in smiling) and the corrugator supercilii (moves the eye brows when frowning) muscles, while the audience was exposed to pictures of happy and angry faces.
The study demonstrated that distinct positive and negative facialemotional response patterns could be spontaneously evoked without the awareness of the positive or negative stimuli.
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