A new architecture based on the Multi-channel Convolutional Neural Network (MCCNN) is proposed for recognizing facial expressions. Two hard-coded feature extractors are replaced by a single channel which is partially trained in an unsupervised fashion as a Convolutional Autoencoder (CAE). One additional channel that contains a standard CNN is left unchanged. Information from both channels converges in a fully connected layer and is then used for classification. We perform two distinct experiments on the JAFFE dataset (leave-one-out and ten-fold cross validation) to evaluate our architecture. Our comparison with the previous model that uses hard-coded Sobel features shows that an additional channel of information with unsupervised learning can significantly boost accuracy and reduce the overall training time. Furthermore, experimental results are compared with benchmarks from the literature showing that our method provides state-of-the-art recognition rates for facial expressions. Our method outperforms previously published methods that used hand-crafted features by a large margin.