We argue until we’re “blue in the face”. If we’re “green around the gills” we’re disgusted by something. “Blushing brides” are happy.

Now research has shown that idioms using facial colour to characterise emotions contain more than a grain of truth. In fact‚ scientists say the colour of our faces gives away our feelings even if we don’t move a muscle.

This holds true regardless of gender‚ ethnicity or overall skin tone‚ said Aleix Martinez‚ a cognitive scientist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University in the US.

His team are patenting the computer algorithms they created and hope they will enable future forms of artificial intelligence to recognise and emulate human emotions. They have formed a spin-off company‚ Online Emotion‚ to commercialise the research.

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