Humans have more ways of expressing joy

Human beings have 17 different facial expressions that tell those around us we are feeling happy.

Experts have discovered that the human face is capable of contorting itself into more happy faces than any other emotion.

Only three facial guises successfully convey fear, four show surprise, and five display sadness and anger.

Researchers at the Ohio State University compiled a list of 821 words that expressed emotions and had these translated into a number of languages including Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Farsi and Russian.

These were entered into popular search engines across countries and the team collected approximately 7.2 million images of facial expressions online.

Using computer algorithms, the researchers established that human face is capable of configuring itself in 16,384 unique ways, combining different muscles in different ways.Despite the plethora of facial arrangements that are possible with the human face, researchers found only 35 were transferable over different cultures.

This may be a testament to the variety of ways in which joy is felt by humans, such as in the form of cheer, delight and contentedness.

Professor Aleix Martinez, cognitive scientist, at The Ohio State University, said: ‘Happiness acts as a social glue and needs the complexity of different facial expressions; disgust is just that: disgust.’

Disgust is only revealed by our faces via one culturally transferable expression.

The latest study builds on Martinez’s previous research that showed people can correctly identify facial emotions about 75 percent of the time based solely on tiny differences in differences such as the colour of a person’s nose, eyebrows, cheeks or chin.So they were shocked to find that only 35 expressions could be understood across all of human kind. The latest findings are published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. In a recent study, researchers at UC Berkeley found there are 27 distinct human emotions.

It was originally thought we feel just six emotions.

Researchers asked more than 800 participants to freely report or rank the emotions they felt after watching 30 short video clips.

In addition to happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and, disgust, they also determined confusion, romance, nostalgia, sexual desire, and others to be distinct emotions.

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