Daniel Cordaro ’07 speaks with the assuredness of a man who has probed the emotions of thousands of people across dozens of cultures.

Although this might seem to be an unusual ability for someone who graduated from Ithaca College with a chemistry degree—and who once described the fume hood in a lab as a “comfort zone”—Cordaro insists that his career path has followed a logical progression.

During his first year at IC, Cordaro was recruited to perform research in the chemistry department. Over the four years he spent at Ithaca, he traveled to California and Germany to work with nanoparticles and synthetic chemistry.

A self-described introvert in high school, Cordaro gained experience at Ithaca College that helped him come out of his shell and do a complete “personality 180,” he said. After graduation, he was accepted into the graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley, where he completed his master’s degree in chemistry.

Shortly after he began teaching, Cordaro saw that he was more interested in the way his students were learning and expressing themselves than in the chemistry he was teaching to them.

“I started to realize that I wasn’t really built to be a chemist psychologically,” Cordaro said. “I’m more into figuring out why people do the things they do.”

He started to read psychology books, learning about the complexity of human emotion and behavioral science.“I loved it,” Cordaro said. “I couldn’t get enough of it.”

Soon after, Cordaro went to work as a research assistant with a group in San Francisco and began his seminal work cataloguing human emotional expression. In order to determine whether human emotional expression is universal or culturally determined, Cordaro and his fellow researchers traveled around the world, collecting and analyzing over 5,000 examples of expression.

The results of the research, which Cordaro explained in a lecture at IC last fall, indicated that there are 25 expressions in the human repertoire that are universally recognizable, such as pride (head tilts back, corners of the mouth go up in a slight smile, and jaw thrusts out), disgust (eyes narrow and eyebrows pull down and in, nose wrinkles at bridge, upper lip rises, and tongue sticks out), and flirtatiousness (head turns to the side, eye contact is maintained, and corners of the lips are pulled up in a smile).

“The idea that human beings all speak the same fundamental, basic, nonverbal language blew my mind,” Cordaro said.

Though on the surface chemistry and psychology are extremely different, Cordaro said that both subjects speak to a deeper understanding of the motivations behind human actions and emotions.

“Learning about human emotions, the way people interact, the way they behave, and the reasons that they behave the way that they do is a fundamental part of what it means to be a human being,” Cordaro said. “I want to bring that [understanding] to people as effectively as I can.”

Last January, Cordaro traveled to Southeast Asia where he collaborated with schools in Thailand and Japan to collect more data on emotional expression.

“The more I travel, the more I get to experience human similarities and differences firsthand, and I can feel myself connecting with people on a basic human level,” Cordaro said. “Travel has given me subjective evidence that there is something common among all people despite cultural and linguistic boundaries.”

This past fall, Cordaro became a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.