There are a lot of us. All with different cultures, languages, beliefs.

So yeah. Communication. It’s not always easy.

But no matter where we come from or the languages we speak, by using these we can still connect with other humans.

And now, maybe with them, too.

There are so many purposes of facial expressions.

I'm David Matsumoto. I'm a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, and I'm also Director of Humintell.

The face is one of the most complex signal systems we have in the body and it serves many purposes.

For example, when we wrinkle our nose in disgust like this, not only is it communicating something to you who can perceive my expression, but what it's also doing is clamping down a little bit on those nasal passages. It's preventing things from coming into my body through my nasal passage.

Facial expressions also communicate to the people around us. One of the biggest advocates for this theory: Charles Darwin.

Darwin posited that all humans have emotions. It allows us to act immediately with minimal conscious thinking or awareness. And then on top of that, we had these expressions so that we could communicate that reaction to others as well. And that helped the group to survive.

Because of this, Darwin believed our expressions were... universal.

In psychology today, there's widespread agreement that seven facial expressions of emotion are universally recognized all around the world, regardless of race, color, creed, nationality, gender, any demographic that exists.

They are anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

So this means, as humans, we can talk to each other, even without words.

But, can facial expressions help us connect with human-like technology?

The robot is a way to understand human self for me, right? By creating the very human-like robot, I believe that we can get some knowledge about the humans.

My name is Hiroshi Ishiguro. I'm a roboticist.

Well, what I could learn through the robots... So many things, right?

We are trying to develop interactive robots with humans, and we are studying how the human can interact with the robots. So in order to develop that kind of a robot, the facial expressions and the gazing directions, gazing control of the robot is very important. The robot need to represent the emotions and intelligence in many ways.

We have totally different cultures between the United States and Japan, right? But I know that we understand emotional expressions. There is no doubt. The emotional facial expression is a very important way of a communication.

So therefore, the facial expression is very important for the android for having the communications with the humans.

Meet Erica.

I think Erica is the most human-like android in the world. Erica can have a kind of a natural conversation with the visitors, maybe the five or 10 minutes.

We are implementing maybe just major of the facial expressions to the Erica. Happy, and angry, and sad, and depressed.

So android can have the communications by exchanging the facial expressions, even if android doesn't understand the language

By designing robots to have facial expressions, humans could more easily connect with them and incorporate them into our lives

It's just really interesting because we use our faces to reference many different content of mental states.

By expressing the facial expressions, even if we don't understand our language each other, we can share some information.

And because of that, facial expressions of emotion are the closest thing we have to a universal language. They allow us to share emotions with each other, they allow us to share the time when we laugh together or cry together.

If there’s anything out there, they're the single most important vehicle that we have that can bring us all together.