The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
Peter Drucker.
The facial expression of emotion: productivity and interpretation
Facial expressions are a window to one’s soul; they are also a way to learn more about the physical environment without having a first-hand experience of the surroundings. For example, by looking at another person’s face, you can decide to try a new food, you can receive reinsurance to continue with an action, or you can determine whether there is a threat nearby. Being able to reliably interpret facial expressions would be highly adaptive if it is also a way to anticipate other people’s most likely next action.
From this results the need to:
produce reliable signals for others to use;
being able to read and interpret those signals.
A universality of a sort in facial displays would be much helpful in the interpretation of expressions as people around the globe would have the same codes and would thus understand facial cues in similar ways, regardless of the culture or origin of the sender (i.e. the one producing the facial expression).
Universal facial expressions?
Paul Ekman and his colleagues were the first ones to look at facial displays in different cultures in the 1970s, looking at spontaneous displays in various contexts and soon found the core question in this matter: “are facial expressions universal?”. They focused on facial displays of primary emotions (see A story of emotion II) as if any expression were universal, it was assumed it would be one representing a biologically-based/physiological response. In order to prove their assumption of universality right, they showed Western faces posing one of the six primary emotions (anger, fear, happiness, disgust, sadness, and surprise) to an isolated tribe from Papua, New Guinea, who has very few (if any) contact with Western societies at that time; they also collected photos of the members of the tribe’s expressions. The idea was that if people from an isolated tribes, with no previous exposure to American facial expressions could understand the which emotion was presented (and vice versa), facial expressions of emotion must be universally expressed.
They asked people in each group (Papua vs U.S.A.) to identify which emotion they thought were displayed on faces of individuals from either the same group or a different culture. People in both cultures were able to identify the correct emotion associated with the facial expressions. From this, Ekman and his colleagues confirmed their idea that facial expression of primary emotions were correctly identified/labelled cross-culturally. They defined prototypical displays for each of the six so-called primary, basic emotions; they argued that those displays were innate and universal as people from different cultures could recognise the emotion expressed and displayed it themselves in a very similar way.
Even though this experiment presented some flows and is nowadays outdated, this first study opened the way to cross-cultural studies of facial displays and expressions and led the way to the development of a new theory: the cultural accents.
To be continued...
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