About 25 years ago, Ekman and colleagues conducted extensive studies of the expression of the emotions.  A century earlier, Darwin had published a book on the expression of the emotions in man and animals, claiming that there were some universal features.  Later scientists denied this, saying that there were no universals.  The expression of emotions did not, according to them, have a universal instinctive basis, but was culturally acquired, and varied from culture to culture.  Ekman's studies seem to have shown, fairly conclusively, that this is wrong.  They found a high degree of correlation across very different cultures between the recognition of certain emotions, using photographs of different facial types.