Publications

Current Directions in Psychological Science

Semantic Space Theory: Data-Driven Insights Into Basic Emotions

Dacher Keltner
Jeff
Alan Cowen
Dacher Keltner, Jeffrey Brooks, and Alan Cowen

Here we present semantic space theory and the data-driven methods it entails. Across the largest studies to date of emotion-related experience, expression, and physiology, we find that emotion is high dimensional, defined by blends of upward of 20 distinct kinds of emotions, and not reducible to low-dimensional structures and conceptual processes as assumed by constructivist accounts. Specific emotions are not separated by sharp boundaries, contrary to basic emotion theory, and include states that often blend. Emotion concepts such as “anger” are primary in the unfolding of emotional experience and emotion recognition, more so than core affect processes of valence and arousal. We conclude by outlining studies showing how these data-driven discoveries are a basis of machine-learning models that are serving larger-scale, more diverse studies of naturalistic emotional behavior.

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The primacy of categories in the recognition of 12 emotions in speech prosody across two cultures

Alan Cowen
PL
HA
+2
Alan Cowen, Petri Laukka, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Runjing Liu, and Dacher Keltner

What would a comprehensive atlas of human emotions include? For 50 years, scientists have sought to map emotion-related experience, expression, physiology, and recognition in terms of the “basic six”—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

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Intersectionality in emotion signaling and recognition: The influence of gender, ethnicity, and social class

MM
Alan Cowen
Dacher Keltner
Maria Monroy, Alan Cowen, and Dacher Keltner

Emotional expressions are a language of social interaction. Guided by recent advances in the study of expression and intersectionality, the present investigation examined how gender, ethnicity, and social class influence the signaling and recognition of 34 states in dynamic full-body expressive behavior

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Sixteen facial expressions occur in similar contexts worldwide

Alan Cowen
Dacher Keltner
FS
+3
Alan Cowen, Dacher Keltner, Florian Schroff, Brendan Jou, Hartwig Adam, and Gautam Prasad

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.

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

Alan Cowen
Dacher Keltner
Alan Cowen and Dacher Keltner

What emotions do the face and body express? Guided by new conceptual and quantitative approaches, we explore the taxonomy of emotion recognized in facial-bodily expression. Participants judged the emotions captured in 1,500 photographs of facial-bodily expression in terms of emotion categories, appraisals, free response, and ecological validity.

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Universal facial expressions uncovered in art of the ancient Americas: A computational approach

Alan Cowen
Dacher Keltner
Alan Cowen and Dacher Keltner

Central to the study of emotion is evidence concerning its universality, particularly the degree to which emotional expressions are similar across cultures. Here, we present an approach to studying the universality of emotional expression that rules out cultural contact and circumvents potential biases in survey-based methods: A computational analysis of apparent facial expressions portrayed in artwork created by members of cultures isolated from Western civilization.

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Facial movements have over twenty dimensions of perceived meaning that are only partially captured with traditional methods

Alan Cowen
KM
XF
+3
Alan Cowen, Kunalan Manokara, Xia Fang, Disa Sauter, Jeffrey Brooks, and Dacher Keltner

Central to science and technology are questions about how to measure facial expression. Thecurrent gold standard is the facial action coding system (FACS), which is often assumed toaccount for all facial muscle movements relevant toperceived emotion. However, the mapping from FACS codes to perceived emotion is not well understood.

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Emotional expression: Advances in basic emotion theory

Dacher Keltner
DS
JT
+1
Dacher Keltner, Disa Sauter, Jessica Tracy, and Alan Cowen

In this article, we review recent developments in the study of emotional expression within a basic emotion framework. Dozens of new studies find that upwards of 20 emotions are signaled in multimodal and dynamic patterns of expressive behavior.

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The MuSe 2022 Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge: Humor, Emotional Reactions, and Stress

SA
LC
AK
+4
Shahin Amiriparian, Lukas Christ, Andreas König, Eva-Maria Meßner, Alan Cowen, Erik Cambria, and Björn W. Schuller

The 3rd Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge (MuSe) focuses on multimodal affective computing.

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How emotion is experienced and expressed in multiple cultures: a large-scale experiment across North America, Europe, and Japan

Alan Cowen
Jeff
GP
+13
Alan Cowen, Jeffrey Brooks, Gautam Prasad, Misato Tanaka, Yukiyasu Kamitani, Vladimir Kirilyuk, Krishna Somandepalli, Brendan Jou, Florian Schroff, Hartwig Adam, Disa Sauter, Xia Fang, Kunalan Manokara, Panagiotis Tzirakis, Moses Oh, and Dacher Keltner

Core to understanding emotion are subjective experiences and their expression in facial behavior. Past studies have largely focused on six emotions and prototypical facial poses, reflecting limitations in scale and narrow assumptions about the variety of emotions and their patterns of expression.

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GoEmotions: A dataset of fine-grained emotions

DD
DM
JK
+3
Dorottya Demszky, Dana Movshovitz-Attias, Jeongwoo Ko, Alan Cowen, Gaurav Nemade, and Sujith Ravi

Understanding emotion expressed in language has a wide range of applications, from building empathetic chatbots to detecting harmful online behavior. Advancement in this area can be improved using large-scale datasets with a fine-grained typology, adaptable to multiple downstream tasks.

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How emotions, relationships, and culture constitute each other: Advances in social functionalist theory

Dacher Keltner
DS
JL
+2
Dacher Keltner, Disa Sauter, Jessica L. Tracy, Everett Wetchler, and Alan Cowen

Social Functionalist Theory (SFT) emerged 20 years ago to orient emotion science to the social nature of emotion. Here we expand upon SFT and make the case for how emotions, relationships, and culture constitute one another.

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Mapping the passions: Toward a high-dimensional taxonomy of emotional experience and expression

Alan Cowen
DS
JL
+1
Alan Cowen, Disa Sauter, Jessica L. Tracy, and Dacher Keltner

What would a comprehensive atlas of human emotions include? For 50 years, scientists have sought to map emotion-related experience, expression, physiology, and recognition in terms of the “basic six”—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.

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Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients

Alan Cowen
Dacher Keltner
Alan Cowen and Dacher Keltner

Claims about how reported emotional experiences are geometrically organized within a semantic space have shaped the study of emotion. Using statistical methods to analyze reports of emotional states elicited by 2,185 emotionally evocative short videos with richly varying situational content, we uncovered 27 varieties of reported emotional experience.

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What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures

Alan Cowen
XF
DS
+1
Alan Cowen, Xia Fang, Disa Sauter, and Dacher Keltner

Emotional vocalizations are central to human social life. Recent studies have documented that people recognize at least 13 emotions in brief vocalizations. This capacity emerges early in development, is preserved in some form across cultures, and informs how people respond emotionally to music.

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The neural representation of visually evoked emotion Is high-dimensional, categorical, and distributed across transmodal brain regions

TH
Alan Cowen
Dacher Keltner
+1
Tomoyasu Horikawa, Alan Cowen, Dacher Keltner, and Yukiyasu Kamitani

Emotional vocalizations are central to human social life. Recent studies have documented that people recognize at least 13 emotions in brief vocalizations. This capacity emerges early in development, is preserved in some form across cultures, and informs how people respond emotionally to music.

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Deep learning reveals what facial expressions mean to people in different cultures

Cross-cultural studies of the meaning of facial expressions have largely focused on judgments of small sets of stereotypical images by small numbers of people. Here, we used large-scale data collection and machine learning to map what facial expressions convey in six countries.

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Semantic Space Theory: Data-driven insights into basic emotions

Here we present semantic space theory and the data-driven methods it entails. Across the largest studies to date of emotion-related experience, expression, and physiology, we find that emotion is high dimensional, defined by blends of upward of 20 distinct kinds of emotions, and not reducible to low-dimensional structures and conceptual processes as assumed by constructivist accounts.

View paper

Deep learning reveals what vocal bursts express in different cultures

Jeff
PT
Alice Baird
+8
Jeffrey Brooks, Panagiotis Tzirakis, Alice Baird, Lauren Kim, Michael Opara, Xia Fang, Dacher Keltner, Maria Monroy, Rebecca Corona, Jacob Metrick, and Alan Cowen

Human social life is rich with sighs, chuckles, shrieks and other emotional vocalizations, called ‘vocal bursts’. Nevertheless, the meaning of vocal bursts across cultures is only beginning to be understood. Here, we combined large-scale experimental data collection with deep learning to reveal the shared and culture-specific meanings of vocal bursts.

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The ACII 2022 Affective Vocal Bursts Workshop & Competition: Understanding a critically understudied modality of emotional expression

Alice Baird
PT
Jeff
+5
Alice Baird, Panagiotis Tzirakis, Jeffrey Brooks, Chris Gregory, Björn W. Schuller, Anton Batliner, Dacher Keltner, and Alan Cowen

The ACII Affective Vocal Bursts Workshop & Competition is focused on understanding multiple affective dimensions of vocal bursts: laughs, gasps, cries, screams, and many other non-linguistic vocalizations central to the expression of emotion and to human communication more generally.

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Mapping 24 emotions conveyed by brief human vocalization

Alan Cowen
HA
PL
+1
Alan Cowen, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Petri Laukka, and Dacher Keltner

Emotional vocalizations are central to human social life. Recent studies have documented that people recognize at least 13 emotions in brief vocalizations. This capacity emerges early in development, is preserved in some form across cultures, and informs how people respond emotionally to music.

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The ICML 2022 Expressive Vocalizations Workshop and Competition: Recognizing, generating, and personalizing vocal bursts

Alice Baird
PT
GG
+7
Alice Baird, Panagiotis Tzirakis, Gauthier Gidel, Marco Jiralerspong, Eilif B. Muller, Kory Mathewson, Björn W. Schuller, Erik Cambria, Dacher Keltner, and Alan Cowen

The ICML Expressive Vocalization (EXVO) Competition is focused on understanding and generating vocal bursts: laughs, gasps, cries, and other non-verbal vocalizations that are central to emotional expression and communication.

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