Research in the 1960s and 1970s suggested that emotional expressions – smiling when happy, scowling when angry, and so on – were universal. This idea stood unchallenged for a generation.

But a new cohort of psychologists and cognitive scientists are revisiting the data. Many researchers now think that the picture is a lot more complicated, and that facial expressions vary widely between contexts and cultures.

This is an audio version of our feature: Why faces don’t always tell the truth about feelings, written by Douglas Heaven and read by Kerri Smith.

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