What the face displays: Mapping 28 emotions conveyed by naturalistic expression.

What emotions do the face and body express? Guided by new conceptual and quantitative approaches (Cowen, Elfenbein, Laukka, & Keltner, 2018; Cowen & Keltner, 2017, 2018), we explore the taxonomy of emotion recognized in facial-bodily expression. Participants (N = 1,794; 940 female, ages 18-76 years) judged the emotions captured in 1,500 photographs of facial-bodily expression in terms of emotion categories, appraisals, free response, and ecological validity. We find that facial-bodily expressions can reliably signal at least 28 distinct categories of emotion that occur in everyday life. Emotion categories, more so than appraisals such as valence and arousal, organize emotion recognition. However, categories of emotion recognized in naturalistic facial and bodily behavior are not discrete but bridged by smooth gradients that correspond to continuous variations in meaning. Our results support a novel view that emotions occupy a high-dimensional space of categories bridged by smooth gradients of meaning. They offer an approximation of a taxonomy of facial-bodily expressions, visualized within an online interactive map.