Adolphs says classic 'basic emotion' face tests overstate real-world emotion reading

What was said

"The emotional facial expressions that Ekman pioneered, I used them in the first 1994 nature paper with his amydala leion patient, those aren't actually what you normally see walking around the world. People don't have those facial expressions. They are posed facial expressions by actors."

Adolphs argues that widely used facial-expression sets popularised by Paul Ekman are largely staged by actors and paired with multiple-choice labels, which can inflate apparent accuracy in recognising emotions from faces. He says a review paper he co-authored with Lisa Feldman Barrett and others found that, outside these constrained methods, “in general” facial expressions alone are not a reliable readout of how someone feels.