Independent component analysis (ICA) and Gabor wavelets extract the most discriminating features for facial action unit classification by employing either a cosine similarity measure (CSM) classifier or support vector machines (SVMs). So far, only the ICA approach, which is based on the InfoMax principle, has been tested for facial expression recognition. In this paper, in addition to the InfoMax approach, another five ICA approaches extract features from two facial expression databases. In particular, the Extended InfoMax ICA, the undercomplete ICA, and the nonlinear kernel-ICA approaches are exploited for facial expression representation for the first time. When applied to images, ICA treats the images as being mixtures of independent sources and decomposes them into an independent basis and the corresponding mixture coefficients. Two architectures for representing the images can be employed yielding either independent and sparse basis images or independent and sparse distributions of image representation coefficients. After feature extraction, facial expression classification is performed with the help of either a CSM classifier or an SVM classifier. A detailed comparative study is made with respect to the accuracy offered by each classifier. The correlation between the accuracy and the mutual information of independent components or the kurtosis is evaluated. Statistically significant correlations between the aforementioned quantities are identified. Several issues are addressed in the paper: (i) whether features having super- and sub-Gaussian distribution facilitate facial expression classification; (ii) whether a nonlinear mixture of independent sources improves the classification accuracy; and (iii) whether an increased “amount” of sparseness yields more accurate facial expression recognition. In addition, performance enhancements by employing leave-one-set of expressions-out and subspace selection are studied. Statistically significant differences in accuracy between classifiers using several feature extraction methods are also indicated.