A new universal facial expression has been defined that is understandable to all people on Earth.

Visual markers corresponding to a negative moral assessment: anger (A), disgust (B), contempt (C), and a combination of markers of these three emotions (D) - the expression "Not Face" ("Not-a")

Mimicry plays an important role in human communication, without words conveying to the other person information about specific emotions: joy, surprise, contempt, etc.

Many facial expressions are understandable to all people on Earth, regardless of culture and race: a smile is a smile in every corner of the Earth. Now, however, American scientists from Ohio State University for the first time experimentally proved the existence of facial expressions, which replaces a specific verbal phrase from any language on the planet. The expression " Not Face " combines visual markers of three well-known emotions: anger, disgust and contempt. These are reduced eyebrows (AU 4 code in facial morphology), a raised chin (AU 17), compressed lips (AU 24) and a voltage of one or two corners of the lips due to the buccal muscle (AU 14). Collectively, such a universal expression replaces the phrase “No, I do not agree” or, briefly, the interjection “No-a” (Nope).

This is what the universal expression "Not Face" looks like on the faces of people of different races.
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Depending on the specific situation and emotional evaluation, visual markers appear to varying degrees.



People accurately recognize the "Not Face" even in an animal, a demonstration of which is the popular Grumpy Cat meme.



The expression "Not Face" is so well distinguished by man that in sign languages, as it turned out, many deaf and dumb often use it instead of the word "not-a" in fluent speech. This is an undocumented feature of the standard ASL sign language.

As the study showed, in normal speech, English speakers show this expression with a frequency of 4.33 Hertz (that is, the duration of the demonstration of “Not Face” markers is 0.23 seconds), Spanish speakers - 5.23 Hz, Mandarin - 7.49 Hz All these frequencies are in the frequency range of the syllables of oral speech 3-8 Hz, which are comfortably recognized by a person in voice communication.

Scientific article published in the journal Cognition ( pdf ). Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Ohio State University, a specialist in cognitive science and co-author of scientific work Aleiks Martinez (Aleix Martinez) says : “As far as we know, for the first time science has obtained evidence that different facial expressions are combined and form a unique, universal part of speech. Where did this language come from? The scientific community has long been studying this issue. This study shows the connection between speech and the expression of emotion on the face. "

In the future, emotional markers can be taken into account in both speech recognition and face recognition systems when processing a video stream in real time in order to automatically identify people who disagree with something.