According to its characteristics of multi-direction and multi-scale, Gabor wavelet is divided into 13 channels. Due to different contributions of different channels to the recognition rate, a fuzzy integral fusion approach for facial expression recognition is proposed based on optimal channels. Firstly, three optimal channels are selected according to three proposed principles. And then Gabor features of facial expressional images through those optimal channels are extracted with the dimensions reduction. Finally, each optimal channel is used as a classifier and three classifiers are fused based on multi-classifier combination with fuzzy integral. With the results on JAFFE database, it is found that the recognition rate of the proposed algorithm is 94.41%, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.