Facial Expressions say a lot about Mixed Emotions

Identifying emotion can be tough. What you're dealing with may be a combination of several thoughts and feelings. Though scientists could only previously identify six basic human emotions, including happy, fearful, angry, sad, disgusted and surprised, they're now working on "emotion categories" that our facial muscles might make in order to express complex sentiments.

"The problem with that is that we cannot fully understand our cognitive system ... if we do not study the full rainbow of expression that our brain can produce," said Aleix Martinez, an associated professor of Ohio State University, via wptv.com.

A recent study identifies 15 additional "compound emotions" that combine several areas of emotion, which researchers believe could be extremely useful for analyzing the human brain and social communication.

"We've gone beyond facial expressions for simple emotions like 'happy' or 'sad.' We found a strong consistency in how people move their facial muscles to express 21 categories of emotions," said study researcher Aleix Martinez, a cognitive scientist and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University, via Foxnews.com. "That tells us that these 21 emotions are expressed in the same way by nearly everyone, at least in our culture."

For the study, researchers examined 5,000 photographs of 230 college students who were asked to make a facial expression based on how they felt via certain verbal cues.

Findings showed that 21 expressions were unique enough to be consistently distinguished from others.

With further studies, researchers hope to determine the perception of compound emotions and how they might be altered in some psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.