This paper proposes facial expression recognition (FER) with the wild data set. In particular, this paper chiefly deals with two issues, occlusion and intra-similarity problems. The attention mechanism enables one to use the most relevant areas of facial images for specific expressions, and the triplet loss function solves the intra-similarity problem that sometimes fails to aggregate the same expression from different faces and vice versa. The proposed approach for the FER is robust to occlusion, and it uses a spatial transformer network (STN) with an attention mechanism to utilize specific facial region that dominantly contributes (or that is the most relevant) to particular facial expressions, e.g., anger, contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. In addition, the STN model is connected to the triplet loss function to improve the recognition rate which outperforms the existing approaches that employ cross-entropy or other approaches using only deep neural networks or classical methods. The triplet loss module alleviates limitations of the intra-similarity problem, leading to further improvement of the classification. Experimental results are provided to substantiate the proposed approach for FER, and the result outperforms the recognition rate in more practical cases, e.g., occlusion. The quantitative result provides FER results with more than $2.09\%$ higher accuracy compared to the existing FER results in CK+ data sets and $0.48\%$ higher than the accuracy of the results with the modified ResNet model in the FER2013 data set.