Thirty years ago, Ekman traveled to New Guinea to study facial expressions of emotion. He went to live in the last stone-age culture on earth. The people he studied had had virtually no contact with the outside world.
Ekman wanted to know whether facial expressions of specific emotions shown by people in the industrialized world were different from those shown by people in New Guinea. Do emotional expressions change as societies develop or are they fixed and universal?
Ekman showed individuals the photographs of various people and asked them to point to the face that was displaying a particular emotion. He also asked them to be actors and to make facial expressions displaying different emotional states. He discovered that the facial expressions of the tribe in New Guinea were the same as those he had found elsewhere. He concluded that these common expressions reflected a simple set of core universal, human emotions.