Ekman Basic Emotions

A taxonomy proposed by psychologist Paul Ekman that identifies six cross-culturally recognisable emotional expressions — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise — as the building blocks of facial affect. The model has been foundational for computer-vision affect-recognition systems (including widely used libraries like DeepFace) that classify faces into these six categories plus 'neutral'. In accessibility and HCI work, the framework is useful as a shared vocabulary but has well-documented limitations: it reduces affect to discrete labels, encodes culturally specific expression norms despite its universality claims, and performs less reliably on atypical expressions (e.g., disabled bodies, masked faces, non-Western samples). Designers using Ekman-based recognition should treat its outputs as approximate signals and incorporate user-defined personalisation, consent, and override mechanisms.