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Emotion and Expression
Emotion and Expression Paul E Griffiths and Elena Walsh, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract The scientific study of emotional expression began with studies of facial expression in the nineteenth century. Studying these expressions has been an important site for disputes over the existence of a universal human nature and disputes about whether emotions are naturally divided into a manageable number of discrete kinds with innate patterns of behavior evolved by natural selection. A more recent dispute concerns the extent to which facial expressions are voluntary, performative strategies for social gain, as opposed to involuntary expressions of subjective feeling.
What Is at Stake in Discussions of Facial Expression? Emotion can be expressed in the face, voice, posture, and gesture. Since Darwin, most researchers have concentrated on facial expressions. However, in recent years interest in vocal expression has increased, partly due to advances in acoustic technologies (Scherer, 2003). The nature and origins of facial expressions of emotion may not seem at first glance to be a matter of momentous concern for the social sciences and humanities. However, the emotions are widely believed to be a critical feature of moral agency, and are even more widely believed to be a critical part of aesthetic response. If all healthy people display, recognize, and respond to the same limited number of emotional expressions, this suggests a similar uniformity in emotion itself. Conversely, if human expressions of emotion are as diverse as human languages and if humans can only understand the expressive repertoire of their own cultural group, this might support a view of emotions themselves as culturally specific phenomena. The issue of whether emotions fall into a limited number of discrete kinds has also been debated for its own sake, as a foundational issue in the psychology of emotion. Evidence about facial expression has played a critical role in these debates.
The Origins of Research on Facial Expression The scientific study of facial expression began with the nineteenth-century anatomical investigations of Sir Charles Bell (1844) and G.B. Duchenne (1867/1990). The most influential work of the nineteenth century, however, was undoubtedly Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The book started life as a chapter of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), based on notes that Darwin had been accumulating since the 1830s. The chapter grew so large that it became a separate work. In Descent of Man, Darwin aimed to show evolutionary continuity between human ethical behavior and animal behavior and also, via his theory of sexual selection, between the human aesthetic sense and the aesthetic sense of animals. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he aimed to show evolutionary continuity between the human and animal emotions by demonstrating continuity between the facial expressions of humans and animals. Darwin explicitly
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 7
targeted Bell’s claim that the muscles of the human face were created by God to express human emotions. This led him to argue that many movements that now express emotion were vestiges of previous ways of life: “With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except in the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition” (Darwin, 1872: p. 12). Some authors have denied that Darwin ascribed any current adaptive functions to emotional expressions (e.g., Fridlund, 1994). However, to take just one example, Darwin argued that humans (unlike chimpanzees) open their mouths when terrified because (unlike chimpanzees) humans must breathe through their mouth when fleeing. Many of Darwin’s specific claims about the facial movements associated with particular emotions are supported by contemporary research. He also pioneered the use of photographs to test the ability of observers to infer emotional state from facial expression (see Figure 1; Figure 2).
The Affect Program Theory of Facial Expression Darwin’s work on emotional expression was neglected for the first half of the twentieth century. Anthropologists such as Weston La Barre (1947) and Ray Birdwhistell (1963) argued that culturally specific emotional states were signaled in a culturally specific code of facial expressions and gestures acquired by the individual during their upbringing. This culturalist tradition was displaced in the late 1960s by a powerful revival in the Darwinian approach. Many of Darwin’s specific findings about facial expression were confirmed and extended, most notably by the psychologist Paul Ekman and his collaborators (Ekman, 1972). One famous experiment used subjects from the Fore language group in New Guinea with a minimum of prior contact with Westerners and their cultural products. These subjects were given three photographs, each showing a face, and told a story which was designed to involve only one emotion. They were asked to pick the photograph showing the person in the story. This method has the advantage that no translation of the names of emotions is needed. The subjects were highly successful in picking the photograph intended to express the emotion appropriate for each story. The New Guinean subjects were also asked to act out the facial behavior
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.26024-8
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Figure 2 Some photographs used in Ekman and his collaborators’ research on facial expression. From top left: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness. Source: Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., 1975. Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, Ó Paul Ekman. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 1 Photographs used by Darwin to test the recognition of emotion from facial expression. 1–3, Degrees of mild amusement; 4, impassivity; 5, true smile; 6, false smile. Note the electrodes used by Duchenne to stimulate the muscles.
of the people described in the stories. Videotapes of their responses were shown to US college students. The students were generally accurate in their judgments of the emotion intended by the New Guineans. The six facial expressions that figured in these experiments were labeled surprise, joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. These and a seventh initially not distinguished from disgust but later labeled contempt, became the basis of the revival of the Darwinian approach to expression. Ekman conceptualized facial expressions as key components of ‘affect programs,’ complex patterns of facial and other actions controlled by the central nervous system and triggered in response to some specific stimulus (Ekman, 1984). This conceptualization derived, ultimately, from the idea of a ‘fixed action pattern’ as it figures in the classical ethology of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. These founders of the modern study of animal behavior rediscovered Darwin’s work on the emotions and interpreted it as prefiguring many of their own
ideas (Lorenz, 1965). Emotions, they argued, were innate patterns of behavior that had evolved by natural selection. Darwin’s emphasis on the vestigial nature of many human facial expressions was interpreted using the ethological concept of ritualization (Tinbergen, 1952). Patterns of behavior that once served a practical function, such as opening the mouth and retching in disgust, were retained and modified by natural selection because of their value as signals. Hence, the primary biological function of facial expressions in humans is as a signal of the person’s emotional state. The distinctive experimental paradigm of classical ethology was the ‘deprivation experiment,’ which aimed to show that an animal will produce a pattern of behavior even when it is deprived of the opportunity to learn that behavior. The human ethologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1973) examined the facial movements of children born deaf and blind and showed that these children used the same patterns of facial action as other children to display their emotions. He concluded that these behaviors were evolved features of human nature. Ekman and his collaborators explained cultural differences in the expression of emotion with the concept of a ‘display rule.’ This concept is exemplified by an experiment in which American and Japanese college students were shown neutral and stress-inducing films while alone in a room. The repertoire of facial behaviors shown during the stress phase by the two sets of subjects was very similar. However, when an experimenter was introduced into the room and allowed to ask questions about the subject’s emotions as the stress film was shown again, the facial behavior of the Japanese diverged radically from that of the Americans. Video analysis showed the momentary occurrence of negative emotional expressions and their replacement with polite smiles. An important feature of the display rule conceptualization of cultural differences is that the evolved expressions remain intact but interact with
Emotion and Expression
culturally specific behaviors to determine the observable pattern of facial action. Ekman and collaborators’ theory of discrete facial expressions of emotions retains a special status in the study of emotion and its expression because of the close relationship between the discrete emotions model and the widely used technology for coding facial expression (FACS – Facial Action Coding System) whose use was pioneered by Ekman and collaborators. FACS is a set of objective, anatomical measures that need not be used to classify emotions into a small number of discrete categories; but that use of the method is, for example, integrated into the training manuals for FACS coding.
Universality and Cultural Specificity The research leading to the affect program theory and subsequent discussion have helped to clarify issues about the universality of emotion. The affect programs have the same output across cultures, but they do not have the same input. There are some universal elicitors of affect programs in childhood, such as very loud noises, which elicit fear. There are also systematic biases in the conditioning of affect program responses that could lead to a convergence in the eliciting conditions for adult responses. The general picture, however, is that affect programs come to be associated with whatever stimuli locally fulfill a broad functional role, so that the fear affect program comes to be associated with whatever locally constitutes a threat, the disgust response with whatever locally appears noxious or unclean, and so forth (for a good introduction to work in this area, see Ekman and Davidson, 1994: pp. 144–178). Distinguishing between the universality of outputs and that of inputs makes it clear that at least some disputes over the universality of emotion is merely semantic. Universalists regard two cultures as manifesting the same emotion when they respond in the same way to different stimuli. Their critics insist that having the same emotion means responding in the same way to the same things. Further clarification results from distinguishing the question of whether emotions are pancultural (found in all cultures) from the question of whether emotions are universal (found in all healthy individuals). The types of evidence normally gathered by universalists are designed to show that emotions are pancultural and have little bearing on the question of universality. Emotions might be pancultural but still be like blood type or eye color, with several different types of individual in each population. Models of the evolution of social emotions sometimes predict that competing types will be maintained in the same population through competition. It is surprising that the issue of whether emotions have evolved is still so strongly linked to the issue of whether there is a single, universal, human emotional nature. Finally, the debate over universality could be clarified by abandoning the last vestiges of the traditional dichotomy between learned and innate behaviors. Some critics have argued that a biological perspective on emotion is inappropriate merely because the emergence and maintenance of emotional responses depends upon environmental factors. Conversely, evidence that emotions are pancultural and thus likely to be the products of evolution is still thought to imply
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that these emotions are genetically determined and resistant to modification by environmental changes. These inferences ignore the fact that the environment plays a rich and constructive role in the development of even the most stereotypically biological traits, such as bodily morphology or sexual behavior. Evolved emotions, like the rest of evolved psychology, will likely make use of many reliable features of the environment of the developing child in order to construct and maintain themselves. If facial expressions of emotions depend on both genetic and environmental factors in development, as it is commonly assumed all phenotypes do, then they will be open to cultural and individual variation as a result of environmental variation, as well as genetic variation. Some recent work in the psychology of facial expression explicitly adopts this perspective: Elfenbeim et al. (2007) suggest the evidence base favors both universality and cultural specificity, and that research should focus on the ways in which an underlying ‘universal grammar’ of emotional expression is affected by culturally specific emotional dialects. Parkinson (2012) suggests that research on emotional expression should articulate more precisely the ways in which environmental factors influence phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and moment-by-moment social transactions, rather than continuing to fixate on the question of the universality of expressions. Griffiths (1997) suggested that questions of universality can often be usefully reframed in terms of the biological concept of ‘homology’: Are two emotions in different individuals or cultures homologous, that is, are they modified forms of a response in a common ancestor of those individuals or cultures?
Contemporary Alternatives to the Affect Program Theory Skepticism about the affect program view of emotion, as well as of emotional expression, has been articulated most clearly in recent years by James A. Russell (2003) and Lisa Feldman Barrett (2006a,b) under the label of ‘psychological constructionism.’ Russell and Barrett object to affect program theory for taking emotion words like ‘anger’ and ‘fear’ as psychological primitives. They claim that the fundamental building block of emotion is ‘core affect’; a subjective awareness of one’s bodily state along two dimensions, valence (pleasure to displeasure) and arousal (activation to deactivation). Core affect becomes emotion only when top-down processes of categorization couple one’s affective bodily state to an external event. For example, when a bushwalker couples his sudden sweating and increased heart rate with the fact that he can see a snake nearby, he labels his experience as one of ‘fear.’ If he did not categorize his experience in this way, he would not be feeling the emotion of fear. Because this ability to categorize requires social learning, and because social learning varies by culture, core affect theory opposes universalism about discrete emotions and about their expressions. However, Russell and Barrett think that the underlying processes of valence and arousal are universal, even if their means of expression are necessarily mediated by culturally specific factors. Barrett and Russell are part of a wider group of emotion researchers who have questioned the affect program theory’s
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account of the production and interpretation of facial expression (Russell and Fernandez-Dols, 1997). However, not all of these authors subscribe to Russell and Barrett’s psychological constructionist account of emotion. Some, for example, are more concerned with the interpersonal nature of emotions, and with the idea that expressions are primarily signals, rather than expressions of an internal, motivational state (Fridlund, 1991; Parkinson et al., 2005). Some critics have offered methodological criticisms of the work of Ekman and his collaborators. They are critical of the use of forced choices from a list of emotion terms dictated by the experimenter. This procedure forces a range of responses to a range of facial signals into a few boxes defined by the experimenter. It cannot provide evidence for the existence of a limited number of discrete facial expressions, since this assumption is built into the experimental procedure. On the positive side, critics of the affect-program view have produced considerable evidence of ‘audience effects’ on the production of emotional expressions. This is interpreted as evidence that expressions are produced for the benefit of the audience rather than to express the feelings of the person making the display. This suggests that the affect program theory exaggerates the automated nature of emotional expressions and neglects their voluntary, performative aspect. While they criticize the experiments usually taken to establish the universality of emotion, many critics accept that emotional expressions have evolved and would therefore presumably expect the flexible signaling system they describe to be at least substantially pancultural. Alan Fridlund (1994) argues that an evolutionary perspective actually favors the view that emotional expression is a form of paralanguage, since involuntary signals of true emotional state would be subverted by the evolution of dissimulation and deceit. While this is an important perspective on the evolution of emotional expressions, it does not constitute the decisive argument that Fridlund seems to suppose. Veridical signals do evolve in nature, often by making use of the so-called hard-to-fake signals. The cost of being unable to suppress a signal of emotional state may be balanced by the advantage of being believed. A purely theoretical argument based on the evolutionary dynamics of signaling systems seems more likely to support the view that “examples of emotional behavior lie along a continuum from expression to negotiation” (Hinde, 1985: p. 989) than a purely expressive or purely manipulative picture of emotional expression.
Conclusion Facial expressions of emotion are an important site for the debate between universalism and cultural specificity about emotion because both sides believe that here they can offer substantial evidence for their positions. An examination of this evidence need not serve only to support one or other side of the debate. The actual details of emotional expression, its evolution, and its development in the individual can be used to question the validity of the dichotomies between biology and
culture, fixity and malleability, universality and idiosyncraticity which are assumed by both sides.
See also: Affect-Regulation Motivation; Avoidance and Approach Motivation: A Brief History; Culture and Emotion; Emotion, Evolution of; Face Recognition Models: Computational Approaches; Face Recognition, Psychological and Neural Aspects; Facial Emotion Expression, Individual Differences in; Flow in Motivational Psychology; Motivation and Actions, Psychology of; Passion and Motivation.
Bibliography Barrett, L.F., 2006a. Are emotions natural kinds? Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, 28–58. Barrett, L.F., 2006b. Solving the emotion paradox: categorisation and the experience of emotion. Personality & Social Psychology Review 10 (1), 20–46. Bell, C., 1844. Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts, third ed. John Murray, London. Birdwhistell, R.L., 1963. The kinesic level in investigations of the emotions. In: Knapp, P.H. (Ed.), Expression of the Emotions in Man. International Universities Press, New York, pp. 123–139. Darwin, C., 1871. The Descent of Man. John Murray, London. Darwin, C., 1872. The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, first ed. Philosophical Library, New York. Duchenne, G.B., 1867/1990. The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., 1973. Expressive behavior of the deaf and blind born. In: von Cranach, M., Vine, I. (Eds.), Social Communication and Movement. Academic Press, London & New York, pp. 163–194. Ekman, P., 1972. Emotions in the Human Face. Pergamon Press, New York. Ekman, P., 1984. Expressions and the nature of emotions. In: Scherer, K.R., Ekman, P. (Eds.), Approaches to Emotion. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 319–344. Ekman, P., Davidson, R.J. (Eds.), 1994. The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford. Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., 1975. Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliff, NJ. Elfenbeim, H.A., Beaupre, M., Lévesque, M., Hess, U., 2007. Toward a dialect theory: cultural differences in the expression and recognition of posed facial expressions. Emotion 7 (1), 131–146. Fridlund, A.J., 1991. Evolution and facial action in reflex, social motive and paralanguage. Biological Psychiatry 32, 3–100. Fridlund, A.J., 1994. Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View. Academic Press Inc., San Diego. Griffiths, P.E., 1997. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Hinde, R.A., 1985. Was ‘expression of the emotions’ a misleading phrase? Animal Behavior 33, 985–992. La Barre, W., 1947. The cultural basis of emotions and gestures. Journal of Personality 16, 49–68. Lorenz, K., 1965. Preface. In: Darwin, C. (Ed.), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Parkinson, B., Fischer, A.H., Manstead, A.S.R., 2005. Emotions in Social Relations: Cultural, Group and Interpersonal Processes. Psychology Press, New York. Parkinson, B., 2012. Piecing together emotion: sites and timescales for social construction. Emotion Review 4 (3), 291–298. Russell, J.A., Fernandez-Dols, J.M. (Eds.), 1997. The Psychology of Facial Expression. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Russell, J.A., 2003. Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review 110 (1), 145–172. Scherer, K., 2003. Vocal communication of emotion: a review of research paradigms. Speech Communication 40 (1–2), 227–256. Tinbergen, N., 1952. Derived activities: their causation, biological significance, origin and emancipation during evolution. Quarterly Review of Biology 27, 1–32.
Abstract The scientific study of emotional expression began with studies of facial expression in the nineteenth century. Studying these expressions has been an important site for disputes over the existence of a universal human nature and disputes about whether emotions are naturally divided into a manageable number of discrete kinds with innate patterns of behavior evolved by natural selection. A more recent dispute concerns the extent to which facial expressions are voluntary, performative strategies for social gain, as opposed to involuntary expressions of subjective feeling.
What Is at Stake in Discussions of Facial Expression? Emotion can be expressed in the face, voice, posture, and gesture. Since Darwin, most researchers have concentrated on facial expressions. However, in recent years interest in vocal expression has increased, partly due to advances in acoustic technologies (Scherer, 2003). The nature and origins of facial expressions of emotion may not seem at first glance to be a matter of momentous concern for the social sciences and humanities. However, the emotions are widely believed to be a critical feature of moral agency, and are even more widely believed to be a critical part of aesthetic response. If all healthy people display, recognize, and respond to the same limited number of emotional expressions, this suggests a similar uniformity in emotion itself. Conversely, if human expressions of emotion are as diverse as human languages and if humans can only understand the expressive repertoire of their own cultural group, this might support a view of emotions themselves as culturally specific phenomena. The issue of whether emotions fall into a limited number of discrete kinds has also been debated for its own sake, as a foundational issue in the psychology of emotion. Evidence about facial expression has played a critical role in these debates.
The Origins of Research on Facial Expression The scientific study of facial expression began with the nineteenth-century anatomical investigations of Sir Charles Bell (1844) and G.B. Duchenne (1867/1990). The most influential work of the nineteenth century, however, was undoubtedly Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The book started life as a chapter of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), based on notes that Darwin had been accumulating since the 1830s. The chapter grew so large that it became a separate work. In Descent of Man, Darwin aimed to show evolutionary continuity between human ethical behavior and animal behavior and also, via his theory of sexual selection, between the human aesthetic sense and the aesthetic sense of animals. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he aimed to show evolutionary continuity between the human and animal emotions by demonstrating continuity between the facial expressions of humans and animals. Darwin explicitly
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 7
targeted Bell’s claim that the muscles of the human face were created by God to express human emotions. This led him to argue that many movements that now express emotion were vestiges of previous ways of life: “With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except in the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition” (Darwin, 1872: p. 12). Some authors have denied that Darwin ascribed any current adaptive functions to emotional expressions (e.g., Fridlund, 1994). However, to take just one example, Darwin argued that humans (unlike chimpanzees) open their mouths when terrified because (unlike chimpanzees) humans must breathe through their mouth when fleeing. Many of Darwin’s specific claims about the facial movements associated with particular emotions are supported by contemporary research. He also pioneered the use of photographs to test the ability of observers to infer emotional state from facial expression (see Figure 1; Figure 2).
The Affect Program Theory of Facial Expression Darwin’s work on emotional expression was neglected for the first half of the twentieth century. Anthropologists such as Weston La Barre (1947) and Ray Birdwhistell (1963) argued that culturally specific emotional states were signaled in a culturally specific code of facial expressions and gestures acquired by the individual during their upbringing. This culturalist tradition was displaced in the late 1960s by a powerful revival in the Darwinian approach. Many of Darwin’s specific findings about facial expression were confirmed and extended, most notably by the psychologist Paul Ekman and his collaborators (Ekman, 1972). One famous experiment used subjects from the Fore language group in New Guinea with a minimum of prior contact with Westerners and their cultural products. These subjects were given three photographs, each showing a face, and told a story which was designed to involve only one emotion. They were asked to pick the photograph showing the person in the story. This method has the advantage that no translation of the names of emotions is needed. The subjects were highly successful in picking the photograph intended to express the emotion appropriate for each story. The New Guinean subjects were also asked to act out the facial behavior
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.26024-8
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Figure 2 Some photographs used in Ekman and his collaborators’ research on facial expression. From top left: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness. Source: Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., 1975. Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, Ó Paul Ekman. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 1 Photographs used by Darwin to test the recognition of emotion from facial expression. 1–3, Degrees of mild amusement; 4, impassivity; 5, true smile; 6, false smile. Note the electrodes used by Duchenne to stimulate the muscles.
of the people described in the stories. Videotapes of their responses were shown to US college students. The students were generally accurate in their judgments of the emotion intended by the New Guineans. The six facial expressions that figured in these experiments were labeled surprise, joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. These and a seventh initially not distinguished from disgust but later labeled contempt, became the basis of the revival of the Darwinian approach to expression. Ekman conceptualized facial expressions as key components of ‘affect programs,’ complex patterns of facial and other actions controlled by the central nervous system and triggered in response to some specific stimulus (Ekman, 1984). This conceptualization derived, ultimately, from the idea of a ‘fixed action pattern’ as it figures in the classical ethology of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. These founders of the modern study of animal behavior rediscovered Darwin’s work on the emotions and interpreted it as prefiguring many of their own
ideas (Lorenz, 1965). Emotions, they argued, were innate patterns of behavior that had evolved by natural selection. Darwin’s emphasis on the vestigial nature of many human facial expressions was interpreted using the ethological concept of ritualization (Tinbergen, 1952). Patterns of behavior that once served a practical function, such as opening the mouth and retching in disgust, were retained and modified by natural selection because of their value as signals. Hence, the primary biological function of facial expressions in humans is as a signal of the person’s emotional state. The distinctive experimental paradigm of classical ethology was the ‘deprivation experiment,’ which aimed to show that an animal will produce a pattern of behavior even when it is deprived of the opportunity to learn that behavior. The human ethologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1973) examined the facial movements of children born deaf and blind and showed that these children used the same patterns of facial action as other children to display their emotions. He concluded that these behaviors were evolved features of human nature. Ekman and his collaborators explained cultural differences in the expression of emotion with the concept of a ‘display rule.’ This concept is exemplified by an experiment in which American and Japanese college students were shown neutral and stress-inducing films while alone in a room. The repertoire of facial behaviors shown during the stress phase by the two sets of subjects was very similar. However, when an experimenter was introduced into the room and allowed to ask questions about the subject’s emotions as the stress film was shown again, the facial behavior of the Japanese diverged radically from that of the Americans. Video analysis showed the momentary occurrence of negative emotional expressions and their replacement with polite smiles. An important feature of the display rule conceptualization of cultural differences is that the evolved expressions remain intact but interact with
Emotion and Expression
culturally specific behaviors to determine the observable pattern of facial action. Ekman and collaborators’ theory of discrete facial expressions of emotions retains a special status in the study of emotion and its expression because of the close relationship between the discrete emotions model and the widely used technology for coding facial expression (FACS – Facial Action Coding System) whose use was pioneered by Ekman and collaborators. FACS is a set of objective, anatomical measures that need not be used to classify emotions into a small number of discrete categories; but that use of the method is, for example, integrated into the training manuals for FACS coding.
Universality and Cultural Specificity The research leading to the affect program theory and subsequent discussion have helped to clarify issues about the universality of emotion. The affect programs have the same output across cultures, but they do not have the same input. There are some universal elicitors of affect programs in childhood, such as very loud noises, which elicit fear. There are also systematic biases in the conditioning of affect program responses that could lead to a convergence in the eliciting conditions for adult responses. The general picture, however, is that affect programs come to be associated with whatever stimuli locally fulfill a broad functional role, so that the fear affect program comes to be associated with whatever locally constitutes a threat, the disgust response with whatever locally appears noxious or unclean, and so forth (for a good introduction to work in this area, see Ekman and Davidson, 1994: pp. 144–178). Distinguishing between the universality of outputs and that of inputs makes it clear that at least some disputes over the universality of emotion is merely semantic. Universalists regard two cultures as manifesting the same emotion when they respond in the same way to different stimuli. Their critics insist that having the same emotion means responding in the same way to the same things. Further clarification results from distinguishing the question of whether emotions are pancultural (found in all cultures) from the question of whether emotions are universal (found in all healthy individuals). The types of evidence normally gathered by universalists are designed to show that emotions are pancultural and have little bearing on the question of universality. Emotions might be pancultural but still be like blood type or eye color, with several different types of individual in each population. Models of the evolution of social emotions sometimes predict that competing types will be maintained in the same population through competition. It is surprising that the issue of whether emotions have evolved is still so strongly linked to the issue of whether there is a single, universal, human emotional nature. Finally, the debate over universality could be clarified by abandoning the last vestiges of the traditional dichotomy between learned and innate behaviors. Some critics have argued that a biological perspective on emotion is inappropriate merely because the emergence and maintenance of emotional responses depends upon environmental factors. Conversely, evidence that emotions are pancultural and thus likely to be the products of evolution is still thought to imply
459
that these emotions are genetically determined and resistant to modification by environmental changes. These inferences ignore the fact that the environment plays a rich and constructive role in the development of even the most stereotypically biological traits, such as bodily morphology or sexual behavior. Evolved emotions, like the rest of evolved psychology, will likely make use of many reliable features of the environment of the developing child in order to construct and maintain themselves. If facial expressions of emotions depend on both genetic and environmental factors in development, as it is commonly assumed all phenotypes do, then they will be open to cultural and individual variation as a result of environmental variation, as well as genetic variation. Some recent work in the psychology of facial expression explicitly adopts this perspective: Elfenbeim et al. (2007) suggest the evidence base favors both universality and cultural specificity, and that research should focus on the ways in which an underlying ‘universal grammar’ of emotional expression is affected by culturally specific emotional dialects. Parkinson (2012) suggests that research on emotional expression should articulate more precisely the ways in which environmental factors influence phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and moment-by-moment social transactions, rather than continuing to fixate on the question of the universality of expressions. Griffiths (1997) suggested that questions of universality can often be usefully reframed in terms of the biological concept of ‘homology’: Are two emotions in different individuals or cultures homologous, that is, are they modified forms of a response in a common ancestor of those individuals or cultures?
Contemporary Alternatives to the Affect Program Theory Skepticism about the affect program view of emotion, as well as of emotional expression, has been articulated most clearly in recent years by James A. Russell (2003) and Lisa Feldman Barrett (2006a,b) under the label of ‘psychological constructionism.’ Russell and Barrett object to affect program theory for taking emotion words like ‘anger’ and ‘fear’ as psychological primitives. They claim that the fundamental building block of emotion is ‘core affect’; a subjective awareness of one’s bodily state along two dimensions, valence (pleasure to displeasure) and arousal (activation to deactivation). Core affect becomes emotion only when top-down processes of categorization couple one’s affective bodily state to an external event. For example, when a bushwalker couples his sudden sweating and increased heart rate with the fact that he can see a snake nearby, he labels his experience as one of ‘fear.’ If he did not categorize his experience in this way, he would not be feeling the emotion of fear. Because this ability to categorize requires social learning, and because social learning varies by culture, core affect theory opposes universalism about discrete emotions and about their expressions. However, Russell and Barrett think that the underlying processes of valence and arousal are universal, even if their means of expression are necessarily mediated by culturally specific factors. Barrett and Russell are part of a wider group of emotion researchers who have questioned the affect program theory’s
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Emotion and Expression
account of the production and interpretation of facial expression (Russell and Fernandez-Dols, 1997). However, not all of these authors subscribe to Russell and Barrett’s psychological constructionist account of emotion. Some, for example, are more concerned with the interpersonal nature of emotions, and with the idea that expressions are primarily signals, rather than expressions of an internal, motivational state (Fridlund, 1991; Parkinson et al., 2005). Some critics have offered methodological criticisms of the work of Ekman and his collaborators. They are critical of the use of forced choices from a list of emotion terms dictated by the experimenter. This procedure forces a range of responses to a range of facial signals into a few boxes defined by the experimenter. It cannot provide evidence for the existence of a limited number of discrete facial expressions, since this assumption is built into the experimental procedure. On the positive side, critics of the affect-program view have produced considerable evidence of ‘audience effects’ on the production of emotional expressions. This is interpreted as evidence that expressions are produced for the benefit of the audience rather than to express the feelings of the person making the display. This suggests that the affect program theory exaggerates the automated nature of emotional expressions and neglects their voluntary, performative aspect. While they criticize the experiments usually taken to establish the universality of emotion, many critics accept that emotional expressions have evolved and would therefore presumably expect the flexible signaling system they describe to be at least substantially pancultural. Alan Fridlund (1994) argues that an evolutionary perspective actually favors the view that emotional expression is a form of paralanguage, since involuntary signals of true emotional state would be subverted by the evolution of dissimulation and deceit. While this is an important perspective on the evolution of emotional expressions, it does not constitute the decisive argument that Fridlund seems to suppose. Veridical signals do evolve in nature, often by making use of the so-called hard-to-fake signals. The cost of being unable to suppress a signal of emotional state may be balanced by the advantage of being believed. A purely theoretical argument based on the evolutionary dynamics of signaling systems seems more likely to support the view that “examples of emotional behavior lie along a continuum from expression to negotiation” (Hinde, 1985: p. 989) than a purely expressive or purely manipulative picture of emotional expression.
Conclusion Facial expressions of emotion are an important site for the debate between universalism and cultural specificity about emotion because both sides believe that here they can offer substantial evidence for their positions. An examination of this evidence need not serve only to support one or other side of the debate. The actual details of emotional expression, its evolution, and its development in the individual can be used to question the validity of the dichotomies between biology and
culture, fixity and malleability, universality and idiosyncraticity which are assumed by both sides.
See also: Affect-Regulation Motivation; Avoidance and Approach Motivation: A Brief History; Culture and Emotion; Emotion, Evolution of; Face Recognition Models: Computational Approaches; Face Recognition, Psychological and Neural Aspects; Facial Emotion Expression, Individual Differences in; Flow in Motivational Psychology; Motivation and Actions, Psychology of; Passion and Motivation.
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