Enrichment of knowledge becomes possible only through literature search on any topic of interest. It is true even in the case of 'Facial Expression Recognition'. So it is attempted to have a broad look into the origin and development of 'Facial Expression Recognition' in the recent past. It has been developed, into a topic of interest, only after the contributions made by Ekman and Friesen. Though there are many expressions yet to be recognized, significant contributions are made by many eminent scholars to identify the six primary emotions viz. happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise and anger. In this paper, we attempted to bring to lime light some of the important contributions on the subject.