Psychologists assess and treat emotion deficits in people suffering from mental illness using similar methods. The growing economy of emotion-reading gadgets and apps also assumes universality, as if emotions can be read in the face or in patterns of bodily changes in the absence of context, as easily as reading words on a page. The sheer amount of time, effort, and money going into these efforts is mind-boggling. But what if the fact of universal emotions isn’t a fact at all?
