Babel - reading facial expressions

Maybe there is a supra-language common to all people. This may explain why, despite having been scattered (in the Biblical sense) to all parts of the world, people still manage to do things together. So maybe if we all just stopped talking... Paul Ekman is the guru of face language. Here's an excerpt from a short interview with him:

JF - More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that human facial expressions are universal. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead thought the opposite. What do you think?
PE - Initially, back in 1965, I thought Margaret Mead was probably right. But I decided to get the evidence to settle the argument. I showed pictures of facial expressions to people in the U.S., Japan, Argentina, Chile and Brazil and found that they judged the expressions in the same way. But this was not conclusive because all these people could have learned the meaning of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. I needed visually isolated people unexposed to the modern world and the media. I found them in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the West.

The rest of the interview: A Conversation With Paul Ekman: The 43 Facial Muscles That Reveal (Judy Foreman, NYT, August 5, 2003)
Artnatomia's Flash application for setting facial expression
Malcolm Gladwell on reading facial expression
Wikipedia on the Facial Action Coding System developed by Ekman

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