Core to understanding emotion are subjective experiences and their embodiment in facial behavior. Past studies have focused on six emotions and prototypical facial poses, reflecting limitations in scale and narrow assumptions about emotion. We examine 45,231 reactions to 2,185 evocative videos, largely in North America, Europe, and Japan, collecting participants’ self-reported experiences in English or Japanese and manual/automated annotations of facial movement. We uncover 21 dimensions of emotion underlying experiences reported across languages. Facial expressions predict at least 12 dimensions of experience, despite individual variability. We also identify culture-specific display tendencies—many facial movements differ in intensity in Japan compared to the U.S./Canada and Europe, but represent similar experiences. These results reveal how people actually experience and express emotion: in high-dimensional, categorical, and complex fashion.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.