Seven Universal Emotions
Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt — the seven basic emotions shown by Ekman's research to be recognized across all human cultures.
Through cross-cultural fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s — including with the pre-literate Fore people of Papua New Guinea — Dr. Paul Ekman established that seven core emotions produce distinctive, recognizable facial expressions in every culture studied.
These seven emotions form the discrete-emotion target set used by most commercial emotion-AI platforms. They are complemented in modern systems by continuous dimensional measures (valence and arousal) and finer-grained AU-level analysis.
Related terms: paul ekman, valence, arousal, facial action coding system
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