Great Discoveries: Universals in Emotional Expression | Psychology Today

Original URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-meaning-of-life/201903/great-discoveries-universals-in-emotional-expression

Author: Douglas T. Kenrick Ph.D.

Date Published: 2019-03-24

Date Visited: 2024-11-06

In 1969, Paul Ekman was presenting his findings on the universality of human facial expressions to a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, when an anthropologist tried to stop him from completing his talk, shouting out that Ekman was a “fascist.” Around that same time, Ekman even drew fire from the world’s most famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who claimed that Ekman was guilty of “improper anthropology.” Mead, who had championed the Blank Slate view of human nature, was critical of Ekman for disagreeing with Ray Birdwhistell, another prominent anthropologist who had conducted research on nonverbal behavior. Birdwhistell, relying on anecdotes about cross-cultural differences in emotional expression, had advanced the argument that, contrary to the claim made a century earlier by Charles Darwin, there are no universals in emotional expression.

The controversy about whether there are universal emotional expressions, and how many such universals there might be, continues to this day. This question has been a central battlefield in the war over human nature. According to one of my ASU colleagues, Bradley Irish, an English professor who studies emotion in literature, the majority of his colleagues in the humanities not only doubt that there is any such a thing as human nature, they are in fact adamantly opposed to the very possibility. Of course, the question is a scientific one, not an issue of preferences. And Paul Ekman, working with his colleague Wallace Friesen, produced a line of evidence that is especially annoying to anyone who would prefer to continue clinging to the Blank Slate view.

My colleague Lani Shiota (whose work I have discussed here) studies positive emotions, and also happens to be a personal friend of Paul Ekman. When she came to talk to my class on “The Discovery of Human Nature,” she suggested that the students read what has become the classic paper on this topic. In a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1971, Ekman and Friesen presented a set of findings that strongly supported Darwin’s assumption that there are universals in emotional expression. Shiota told us an interesting background story: Ekman had originally been inspired to conduct his cross-cultural research by Silvan Tomkins. Silvan Tomkins had earlier postulated a set of basic and universal human emotional systems, including enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, distress-anguish, anger-rage, fear-terror, shame-humiliation. Following Charles Darwin, Tomkins believed that these systems were inherited from our ancestors, and served adaptive functions—inclining us to act in adaptive ways when we encountered particular threats or opportunities.

If emotions are in fact aspects of human nature, they ought to be found across human societies. In his classic book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin had presented preliminary findings for emotional universality. But Darwin’s methods were not very rigorous; he had sent letters to missionaries and others living in remote societies, and asked them whether emotions such as fear were expressed using the same facial movements as those used in England. Darwin's colleagues responded in the affirmative, but obviously, this method raised a number of questions about observer bias and objectivity.

So Tomkins independently encouraged both Paul Ekman and another young researcher, Carroll Izard, to gather more rigorous data on emotional expressions across different societies. Working without awareness of the other’s research, both Izard and Ekman collected data supporting the idea that people living in different societies are able to recognize the different emotions that Tomkins had postulated. The new evidence had been collected in ways that diminished concerns about observer bias. Rather than asking European visitors to the different societies to draw their own conclusions, these researchers instead asked natives of different societies to view photographs of people expressing vivid emotions, and to choose which emotion they thought was being expressed.

There was, however, still an argument that a Blank Slate theorist could make: the subjects in most of the new studies came from modern societies, and had likely come in contact with European cultures both directly and indirectly – via magazines, movies, and television programs, for example. Maybe they were using their knowledge of European and American social norms to tell the researchers what the subjects guessed the researchers wanted to hear.

To gather evidence addressing that potential criticism, Ekman and Friesen needed to find people who had no contact with modern society; who had not seen European magazines or movies, or worked with Europeans, for example. Ideally, they needed to find people who had not even interacted with people from other societies. To get that evidence, they took a set of emotional photographs into the remote highlands of Papua, New Guinea, where they located 319 members of the Fore tribe who had never seen a movie, could not speak or read English or Pidgin, and who had never lived in a Western settlement or worked for a European.

THE BASICS

Collecting data from the Fore presented its own special challenges. Since the Fore did not read, it was not possible to simply present them with a list of emotion words. It was also unclear whether the Fore language even contained single words that were equivalent to the single emotional words familiar to English speakers. The researchers tried asking the subjects to tell a story about the faces in the pictures, but the Fore found that task confusing and difficult. The researchers finally decided to use a method that previous researchers had used with children who did not know how to read: The translator read the Fore subject a story and then asked him or her to choose one of three emotional expressions that matched the story.

Douglas Kenrick Emotional expressions similar to those used by Ekman and Friesen. Source: Douglas Kenrick

For example, for happiness, subjects would simply hear the story: “His friends have come, and he is happy,” and they would be asked to choose between 3 photos—one in which a person was showing what Westerners would regard as a smile, another in which the person was making what we would regard as a disgust face, and a third in which the person was making what we would consider an angry expression. If there was no cross-cultural commonality of emotional expressions, the Fore would have chosen the happy face only one third of the time. In that particular comparison, though, they picked the happy face fully 100 percent of the time.

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As another example, the subject was told a story about someone who was all alone in her hut, with no weapons, when a wild pig walks into the hut, refuses to leave, and the person is very afraid that the pig is going to bite her. When asked to choose between three faces expressing what we would regard as anger, happiness, and fear, 86 percent chose the same face Westerners would have picked.

The only cases in which Fore tribe members made a choice we would regard as incorrect was when they had to choose between a surprise and a fear face. As Ekman and Friesen note, this might be because situations in which a person feels fear are also likely to be situations in which they are surprised (in this case, when a wild pig walks into one’s hut).

Ekman and Friesen even considered the remote possibility that the generally high levels of agreement between Fore tribespeople and European Americans might have been due to some transmission of information from people who indirectly had contact with Western settlements. To test that, they also found a group of Fore who did speak English, had seen movies, and had worked or gone to school in English-speaking settlements for at least a year. The results were exactly the same, the Fore with high levels of contact did no better or worse than their cousins who had little contact, and also tended to choose the surprise face when told a story that elicited fear. Likewise, a group of young Fore children who had never before encountered a European or any European cultural media, also performed quite well at the task.

When Shiota discussed these results with my class, she pointed out that years of research across many different cultures has suggested that there is are in fact some universal facial expressions, with people everywhere distinguishing happy expressions from fear and both of those from anger and disgust, for example. She also noted that people judging expressions made by members of their own culture do slightly better than people judging expressions made by people from other cultures, though even with same-culture expressions, the agreement rates are never 100 percent, and even in maximally different cultures (as in comparing U.S. college students to preliterate tribes in New Guinea) the results are always well above chance.

So, the conclusion from this research is that the slate is definitely not blank, but that, as Darwin hypothesized, humans possess some universal emotional expressions that are likely innate. At the same time, Ekman and his colleagues also found cultural variation in the rules about expressing emotions. Asian participants for example, were less likely to demonstrate vivid emotional expressions in response to emotional films, unless they were in a dark room, in which case an infrared camera revealed that they showed the same expressions as did Americans.

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