Fig. 3. Reliability and specificity of hypothesized facial configurations in each emotion category.

a Emotion categories for which all action units (AUs) were available to be coded. b Emotion categories for which AUs were simulated, given that dynamic AUs could not be coded from photographs. Reliability: The gray box-and-whisker plots show the distribution of match scores between the facial poses and hypothesized facial configurations for each emotion category. Each plot presents the maximum and minimum values as whiskers, the interquartile range as the vertical length of the box, and the median as the horizontal line within the box. The dotted horizontal lines denote the degree of reliability, based on criteria from prior research³⁵: none (0 < 0.2), weak (0.2 < 0.4), moderate (0.4 < 0.7), high (0.7 ≤ 1). Specificity: The orange diamonds represent the proportion of facial poses (N = 604) matching the hypothesized facial configuration for each emotion category that were observed in response to scenarios classified as the same emotion category, calculated as the complement of the false positive rate $\left(\widehat{p_e}\right)$, such that higher scores indicate greater specificity. Error bars represent estimated credibility intervals. We were not able to compute specificity for the emotion categories amusement, embarrassment, pride, or shame because we did not have information about dynamic AUs, which constitute part of the hypothesized facial configurations for these categories. Source data are provided in Supplementary Tables 7 and 10.