An isolated New Guinea tribe read facial expressions just like everyone else

In the late 1960s, psychologist Paul Ekman showed photos of faces to the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, who had almost no contact with the outside world. They matched expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise to the right stories as accurately as Western subjects did, suggesting these expressions are biologically universal, not culturally learned.

— Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Constants Across Cultures in the Face and Emotion — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1971

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