Last week in my Psychology class we were studying Emotion and we briefly discussed facial expressions. My professor, Dr. Martin, listed 7 emotions on the overhead projector. The 7 emotions that he listed were: happy, sad, disgusted, angry, fearful, confused, and satisfied. After he showed us these emotions he went around the classroom and gave 7 students note cards that had an emotion written on it. He had the students who received the note cards make the facial expression that he or she felt best depicted the emotion on the card. The students made their facial expressions one at a time, while the card-less students wrote down what emotion he or she thought the students were expressing. Once this was completed Dr. Martin revealed which emotion each student had expressed. The majority of the class was able to identify the 7 different emotions to the student’s facial expressions. As one of the card less students, I found identifying the student’s facial expressions to be very easy. I was one of the many students to get all 7 correct. I learned that the reason that so many of us were able to easily identify the facial expressions with the correct emotion is because according to Paul Ekman's cross cultural findings in general, universally, people can identify 6 or 7 emotional expressions reliably. Ekman claims that the 7 universal emotional expressions are: joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, and contempt. I found this class exercise to be very interesting.
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