Recently, facial-expression recognition (FER) has primarily focused on images in the wild, including factors such as face occlusion and image blurring, rather than laboratory images. Complex field environments have introduced new challenges to FER. To address these challenges, this study proposes a cross-fusion dual-attention network. The network comprises three parts: (1) a cross-fusion grouped dual-attention mechanism to refine local features and obtain global information; (2) a proposed $C^2$ activation function construction method, which is a piecewise cubic polynomial with three degrees of freedom, requiring less computation with improved flexibility and recognition abilities, which can better address slow running speeds and neuron inactivation problems; and (3) a closed-loop operation between the self-attention distillation process and residual connections to suppress redundant information and improve the generalization ability of the model. The recognition accuracies on the RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet datasets were 92.78%, 92.02%, and 63.58%, respectively. Experiments show that this model can provide more effective solutions for FER tasks.