Similar Facial Expression Responses to Advertising Observed Across the Globe: Evidence for Universal Facial Expressions in Response to Advertising

Effective measurement of audiences’ emotional responses has become a key need in advertising and content research. Analysis of facial responses has become a widespread tool to do so. However, there has been doubt expressed by some authors about the degree to which facial expressions are universal signals of emotional state. Most of the literature exploring the link between facial expressions and emotion relies on small samples and subjective judgements of emotion, so this paper examined data drawn from a commercial global database of over 70,000 studies, which yielded approximately 3.8 million frames of viewers naturalistic facial responses to video advertising content. Evidence supporting the presence of universal facial expressions was found, in the form of strong commonalities in patterns of facial expression observed via separate factor analyses of co-occurring facial action units run across 12 distinct geographical regions. Evidence was also found that these expressions relate to viewers emotional states: several of these universally observed expressions aligned with some of the “basic” emotions codified in academic literature (EMFACS), notably Happiness, Disgust and Surprise. These expressions were also observed to align with the emotional states expected to be evoked by different advertising categories and movie trailer genres. This supports the conclusion that audience facial expressions, on some dimensions, are good indicators of emotional states and can be used to infer reaction to advertising and other emotional stimuli globally.