Subtle facial expression recognition (SFER) aims to classify facial expressions with very low intensity into corresponding human emotions. Subtle facial expression can be regarded as a special kind of facial expression, whose facial muscle movements are more difficult to capture. In the last decade, various methods have been developed for common facial expression recognition (FER). However, most of them failed to automatically find the most discriminative parts of facial expression and the correlation of muscle movements when human makes facial expression, which makes them unsuitable for SFER. To better solve SFER problem, an attention mechanism based model focusing on salient local regions and their correlations is proposed in this paper. The proposed method: 1) utilizes multiple attention blocks to attend to distinct discriminative regions and extract corresponding local features automatically, 2) a correlation attention module is integrated in the model to extract global correlation feature over the salient regions, and finally 3) fuses the correlation feature and local features in an efficient way for the final facial expression classification. By this way, the useful but subtle local information can be utilized in more detail, and the correlation of different local regions is also extracted. Extensive experiment on the LSEMSW and CK+ datasets shows that the method proposed in this paper achieves superior results, which demonstrates its effectiveness. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.