This paper investigates facial emotion recognition using a k-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier and three feature extraction techniques: histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), Gabor filters, and local binary pattern (LBP). The study compares the performance of these techniques on two datasets, Cohn-Kanade (CK+) and Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE), finding Gabor to achieve the highest average accuracy of 94.8% despite requiring the most computational time. The paper concludes that the identified features can enhance the effectiveness of emotion recognition systems in human-machine interactions.