ArticleiScience2024
Deep learning reveals what facial expressions mean to people in different cultures.
Article in iScience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Beyond western paradigms: a cross-cultural review of social-emotional competence frameworks and the promise of AI-driven assessment.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Review
- The Transfer of In-Game Behaviors and Emotions to Real-World Experiences in Game World.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Names with /i/ Suit Positive Faces: The Naming Paradigm.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Naturalistic multimodal emotion data with deep learning can advance the theoretical understanding of emotion.Psychological research · 2024Review
- How emotion is experienced and expressed in multiple cultures: a large-scale experiment across North America, Europe, and Japan.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cross-cultural studies of the meaning of facial expressions have largely focused on judgments of small sets of stereotypical images by small numbers of people. Here, we used large-scale data collection and machine learning to map what facial expressions convey in six countries. Using a mimicry paradigm, 5,833 participants formed facial expressions found in 4,659 naturalistic images, resulting in 423,193 participant-generated facial expressions. In their own language, participants also rated each expression in terms of 48 emotions and mental states. A deep neural network tasked with predicting the culture-specific meanings people attributed to facial movements while ignoring physical appearance and context discovered 28 distinct dimensions of facial expression, with 21 dimensions showing strong evidence of universality and the remainder showing varying degrees of cultural specificity. These results capture the underlying dimensions of the meanings of facial expressions within and across cultures in unprecedented detail.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.