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Welcome to this audio long read from nature.

In this episode, why faces don't always tell the truth about feelings. Written by Douglas

Heaven and read by Kerry Smith. Human faces pop up on a screen, hundreds of them, one after

another. Some have their eyes stretched wide, others show lips clenched. Some have eyes squeezed shut,

cheeks lifted and mouths gape. For each one you must answer this simple question. Is this

the face of someone having an orgasm or experiencing sudden pain? Psychologist Rachel Jack and her

colleagues recruited 80 people to take this test as part of a study in 2018.

The team at the University of Glasgow, UK, enlisted participants from Western and East Asian cultures to explore a long-standing and highly charged question.

To facial expressions reliably communicate emotions.

Researchers have been asking people what emotions they perceive in faces for decades. They have questioned adults and children in different

countries and indigenous populations in remote parts of the world. Influential observations in the

1960s and 70s by US psychologist Paul Ekman suggested that around the world humans could reliably infer emotional states from expressions on faces, implying that emotional expressions are universal.

These ideas stood largely unchallenged for a generation. But a new cohort of psychologists and cognitive scientists

has been revisiting those data and questioning the conclusions. Many researchers now think that the

picture is a lot more complicated and that facial expressions vary widely between contexts and cultures.

Rachel Jack's study, for instance, found that although Westerners and East Asians

had similar concepts of how faces display pain, they had different ideas about expressions of pleasure.

Researchers are increasingly split over the validity of Ekman's conclusions. But the debate

...