Universal Expression of Emotions

1971

Paul Ekman (b. 1934)

Charles Darwin argued for the universality of the visual appearance of human feelings in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In the book, he explored how the varieties of human emotional expression had their origins in nonhuman animal behaviors. This work was picked up in the 1960s by psychologist Paul Ekman, who explicitly acknowledges his debt to Darwin. He and his longtime collaborator, Wallace Friesen, published their famous study, “Constants across Cultures in the Face and Emotion,” in 1971. Since that time, Ekman has become the world’s foremost authority on the facial expression of emotions.

A student of the emotions and personality researcher Silvan Tomkins, Ekman was doing research on the universality of emotional expression in his California laboratory when a federal funding agency asked him if a grant of several hundred thousand dollars might help him do the kind of field studies he needed to do but could not afford. Ekman used the funds to travel to New Guinea to work among the Fore, a tribal group with little exposure to the outside world. Ekman wanted to know if they would recognize various emotional expressions in a standard set of photographs he had developed. He had already shown the photographs to several hundred people living in a variety of cultures and found some support for the universality of several emotional expressions. But his critics pointed out that all his participants had already been exposed to many of the same stimuli through mass media, thus their identification of the emotions might be an artifact of shared cultural experiences. The tribe in New Guinea provided the best test of his theory.

Ekman found that the Fore people identified most of the expressions. Further research has provided general support for the universality of seven primary emotions: sadness, happiness, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and contempt. Of these seven, the expression of happiness is the most common.

SEE ALSO Triangular Theory of Love (1986)

These Venetian carnival masks display a variety of basic human expressions.