Body language and the understanding thereof is a crucial part of communication. It is often assumed that humans can innately recognize other’s emotions, but there is growing evidence that the ability to decipher these emotions is not instinctive but shaped by people’s culturally shared understanding of emotions.
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“Our findings contribute to growing evidence that emotional facial expressions are not universally produced and understood,” added senior author Kristen Lindquist, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the data for the Frontiers in Psychology study was collected.