facial expression handbook of cognition and emotion, Body Language Pack
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In Dalgleish, T., & Power, M. (1999).
Handbook of Cognition and Emotion.
New York: John
Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Chapter 16
Facial Expressions
Paul Ekman
University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA
INTRODUCTION
The argument about whether facial expressions of emotion are universal or culture-specific goes
back more than 100 years. For most of that time the evidence was sparse, but in the last 30 years
there have been many research studies. That has not served to convince everyone, but it has
sharpened the argument. I will review the different kinds of evidence that support universals in
expression and cultural differences. I will present eight challenges to that evidence, and how
those challenges have been met by proponents of universality. I conducted some of this research
and have been active in answering the challenges, so I am not a disinterested commentator, but
probably no-one is. I will try to present the evidence and counter-arguments as fairly as I can, so
that readers can make up their own minds.
Most of the research on universals in facial expression of emotion has focused on one
method—showing pictures of facial expressions to observers in different cultures, who are asked
to judge what emotion is shown. If the observers in the different cultures label the expressions
with the same term, it has been interpreted as evidence of universality. Most of the challenges
have been against this type of evidence, arguing that the lack of total agreement is evidence of
cultural difference.
There have been other types of studies relevant to universals, studies in which facial behavior
itself is measured. This too has been challenged. Near the end of this chapter I will more briefly
summarize still other research relevant to universals, evidence which heretofore has not been
brought to bear: studies of other animals, studies of the relationship between expression and
physiology, studies of the relationship between expression and self-report, and conditioning
studies. In the conclusion I will describe my reading of all the evidence, delineating where there
are universals and the many aspects of facial expressions which differ within and between
cultures.
THE EVIDENCE
1. Evidence from Darwin’s Study
It begins with Charles Darwin’s
The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals
(1872/1998). His evidence for universality was the answers to 16 questions he sent to
Englishmen living or traveling in eight parts of the world: Africa, America, Australia, Borneo,
China, India, Malaysia and New Zealand. Even by today’s standard, that is a very good, diverse,
sample. They wrote that they saw the same expressions of emotion in these foreign lands as they
had known in England, leading Darwin to say: “It follows, from the information thus acquired,
that the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity . . .”
There are three problems that make Darwin’s evidence on universality unacceptable by
today’s scientific standards. First, Darwin did not ask a sufficient number of people in each
country to answer his questions. Second. Darwin relied upon the answers of these Englishmen,
rather than asking the people who were native in each country (or asking his English
correspondents to do so). Current research always studies the people who are native to each
country, not a foreign observer’s interpretation of their behavior. Third, the way in which Darwin
worded his questions often suggested the answer he wanted. For example, Darwin asked, “Is
astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by the eyebrows being
raised?” Instead Darwin should have asked, “What emotion is being shown when a person you
observe has their eyes and mouth open wide and their eyebrows raised?” Even better would have
been to show photographs of facial expressions to people in each country, asking them what
emotion they saw. Although Darwin did use this method, he did so only in England.
Challenge 1: Examples of Cultural Differences
A very influential example of the challenge to Darwin’s view that facial expressions are
universal to the species was raised by the eminent social psychologist Otto Klineberg. While he
acknowledged that a few patterns of behavior are universal, such as crying, laughing and
trembling, Klineberg (1940) said that the expressions of anger, fear, disgust, sadness, etc. are not.
Klineberg cited many observations of cultural differences in expressions noted by
anthropologists, but the deciding evidence for Klineberg was a study which found that humans
could not understand a chimpanzee’s facial expressions. I describe this later in section 10.
The leading advocate of the view that expressions are specific to each culture in the 1960s and
1970s was the anthropologist/linguist Ray Birdwhistell. Birdwhistell (1970) attempted to prove
that body movement and facial expression, what he called
kinesics,
can be best viewed as
another language, with the same type of units and organization as spoken language. Birdwhistell
wrote as follows:
When I first became interested in studying body motion I was confident that it would be
possible to isolate a series of expressions, postures and movements that ‘very denotative of
primary emotional states... As research proceeded, and even before the development of
kinesics, it became clear that this search for universals was culture-bound... There are
probably no universal symbols of emotional state. ... We can expect them [emotional
expressions] to be learned and patterned according to the particular structures of particular
societies (p. 126).
And again:
Early in my research on human body motion, influenced by Darwin’s
The Expression of the
Emotions
in Man and
Animals,
and by my own preoccupation with human universals, I
attempted to study the human smile . . . . Not only did I find that a number of my subjects
“smiled” when they were subjected to what seemed to be a positive environment but some
“smiled” in an aversive one (pp. 29-30).
Birdwhistell failed to consider that there may be more than one form of smiling. He might not
have made that mistake if he had read the work of Duchenne de Boulogne, a nineteenth century
neurologist whom Darwin had quoted extensively. Duchenne (1862/1990) distinguished between
the smile of actual enjoyment and other kinds of smiling. In the enjoyment smile, not only are
the lip corners pulled up, but the muscles around the eyes are contracted, while non-enjoyment
smiles involve just the smiling lips.
We should not fault Birdwhistell too much on this point, however, for up until 1982, no-one
else who studied the smile had made this distinction. Many social scientists were confused by the
fact that people smiled when they were not happy. In the last 10 years, my own research group
and many other research groups have found very strong evidence to show that Duchenne was
correct, there is not one smile, but different types of smiling, only one of which is associated
with actual enjoyment (for a review, see Ekman. 1992).
2. Evidence in Which Multiple Observers in Different Literate Cultures Judge Expressions
It is only in the last 30 years, nearly 100 years after Darwin wrote
The Expression
of The
Emotions in Man and Animals,
that psychologists finally focused their attention on the question
of whether expressions are universal or specific to each culture. Darwin’s method of showing
photographs and asking people to judge the emotion shown in the photograph has been the
principal method. Because there have been so many studies using this research approach, critics
have often ignored the other evidence relevant to universals which used very different methods
of research (see sections 7-10 below). But first, let us consider what have often been called
“judgment studies,” because people in each culture are asked to judge the emotion shown in each
of a series of photographs.
Many countries were studied, and it was natives in each country who were examined. They
were shown photographs of facial expression and asked, not told, what emotion was shown.
Apart from technical problems—a particular photograph not being a very good depiction of a
real emotional expression, the words for emotion not being well translated in a particular
language, or the task of judging what emotion is being shown being very unfamiliar—people
from different countries should ascribe the same emotion to the expressions if there is
universality.
Figure 16.1 shows six of the photographs we (Ekman, Sorenson & Friesen, 1969) used in this
type of research in 1966. These are all actors who were posed by Silvan Tomkins (1962), an
emotion theorist who advised me, and also Carroll Izard (1971), on how to do cross-cultural
research on emotional expression. Our research differed from previous work in how we selected
the particular facial expressions we would show to people in various cultures.
Figure 16.1
Photographs used in cross-cultural research
Previous studies had uncritically accepted as satisfactory every one of the actor’s attempts to
pose an emotion, and had shown them to people in each culture. Inspecting the hundreds of poses
Tomkins’ actors had made, it was obvious that some were better than others. Rather than relying
upon our intuitions, however, we scored the photographs with a new technique we had developed
for measuring facial behavior (Ekman, Friesen & Tomkins, 1971), selecting the ones which met
a priori
criteria for what configurations should be present in each picture. Izard also selected the
photographs to show in his experiments, but by a different procedure. He first showed many
photographs to American students, and then chose only the ones which Americans agreed about
to show to people in other cultures.
I have chosen as the data set to discuss the findings listed and discussed by Russell (1994) in
his attack on universality (a detailed account of how Russell misunderstood those data can be
found in my reply; Ekman, 1994). Usually there was only one group of people studied in each
country, but in some instances there were two or three, so that the total number of groups is 31. I
grouped together the different samples from the same countries, even though they had been
gathered at different times, sometimes by different scientists. This results, then, in providing data
on 21 literate countries: Africa (this included subjects from more than one country in Africa. and
is the only group who were not tested in their own languages but in English). Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, China, England, Estonia, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Kirghizistan,
Malaysia, Scotland, Sweden, Indonesia (Sumatra), Switzerland, Turkey and the USA. This
includes two studies which lied (Ekman, Sorenson & Friesen. 1969: Ekman et al., 1987), and
separate independent studies by five other investigators or groups of investigators (Izard, 1971;
Niit & Valsiner, 1977; Boucher & Carlson, 1980; Ducci, Arcuri, Georgis, & Sineshaw, 1982;
McAndrew, 1986).
In all of these studies the observers in each culture who saw the picture selected one emotion
term from a short list of six to ten emotion terms, translated, of course, into their own language. I
will focus on just the results for the photographs the scientists intended to show happiness, anger,
fear, sadness, disgust and surprise, for these were included in all of the experiments.
There was an extraordinary amount of agreement about which emotion was shown in which
photographs across the 21 countries. In
every
case, the majority in each of the 21 countries
agreed about the pictures that showed happiness, those that showed sadness and those that
showed disgust. For surprise expressions there was agreement by the majority in 20 out of the 21
countries, for fear on 19 out of 21, and for anger in 18 out of 21. In those 6 cases in which the
majority
did not choose the same emotion as was chosen in every other country, the
most
frequent
response (although it was not the majority), was the same as was given by the majority
in the other countries. In my own studies, the only studies in which the expressions were selected
on the basis of measuring the muscle movements shown in the photographs,
all
the expressions
were judged as showing the same emotion by the majority in
every
country we studied.
Contrary evidence, evidence against universality, would have been to find that the expressions
that the majority of people in one country judged as showing one emotion (let us say anger) were
judged as showing another emotion (fear) by the majority in another culture. This never
happened.
Challenge 2: Not Every Culture was Studied
If the requirement is that every country must be studied, and every sub-culture in every country,
then no-one could ever establish that anything is universal. The counter to this criticism is that it
is not plausible for there to be such high agreement in so many different countries—for 21 is not
a small number, and 10 of them were not Western—if expressions are not universal. The
anthropologist Brown (1991) wrote on just this point:
The first and most obvious point about the demonstration of universals is that it is never done
by exhaustive enumeration, showing that a phenomenon exists and existed in each known
individual, society, culture or language. There are too many known peoples to make this
feasible . . . Thus all statements of universality are hypotheses or arguments based on various
limited kinds of evidence . . . (p.
51).
Challenge 3: The Observers Couldn’t Choose Their Own Words
A second challenge, which has been forcefully, but I believe fallaciously, made is that the
appearance of universality was found only because the people in each culture were not allowed
to say what emotion they really thought each expression showed. Recall that the people in every
culture had to register their judgment about the emotion shown in an expression by choosing one
emotion word from a list of emotion terms, such as anger, fear, sadness, disgust, etc. What if
they had been given other words, Russell (1994) argued, might they have not disagreed? Perhaps
those facial expressions really didn’t show any of the emotions on the list, but instead showed
quite unrelated emotions. If only the scientists had allowed them to choose their own words,
rather than forcing them to choose from the scientists’ list of emotion words, then evidence for
cultural differences in emotional expression would have emerged.
There are two answers to this challenge, one logical and the other experimental. If words like
fear, anger, disgust, and happiness are truly unrelated to the expressions, if they are as
meaningless when it comes to registering the emotion shown in an expression as a set of
nonsense syllables (oto, nim, faz, etc.), then widespread disagreement would have been found
when people were asked to use this list to choose a word which fitted each expression. People
within each culture would have disagreed with each other, and that is not what was found. And
people across cultures would have disagreed with each other, and that also was not found. Just
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