How did fear become a scientific object and what kind of object is it?

Representations

Volumn 110, Issue , 2010, Pages 66-104

  Leys, Ruth ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77951670266     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2010.110.1.66     Document Type: Review

References (132)

1. "In recent years and with the intensification of anti-terrorism efforts, there has been a clear desire to improve or replace the polygraph technology with something better. There is a real need for administering real-time, highly automated veracity tests inside the country and around the globe, where human intelligence is being collected. At the same time, similar technology may be useful for quick screening of potential suspects in ports of entry"; P. Tsiamyrtzis et al. (Paul Ekman is one of the six authors of this paper), "Imaging Facial Physiology for the Detection of Deceit," International Journal of Computer Vision 71, no. 2 (2007): 198
2. For a popular presentation of the work of Paul Ekman and others on terrorist surveillance and lie detection see Robin Marantz Henig, "Looking for the Lie," New York Times Magazine, 5 February 2006. Ekman has recently served as scientific consultant to the Fox Broadcasting Company's TV series, Lie to Me, featuring a leading deception expert who studies facial expressions and involuntary body language to discover not only if someone is lying but also why. In its Time 100 issue for 2009, Time magazine selected Ekman as one of the world's one hundred most influential people
3. Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Pictures of Facial Affect (Palo Alto, CA, 1976), reproduced by permission
4. The emotion field has benefited by invoking Charles Darwin's writings on facial expression, but it has frequently misinterpreted his ideas. Darwin is typically thought to have proposed that expressions are selected and adapted for the communication of emotion. But as Alan Fridlund has pointed out, Darwin's conclusion was the opposite: he believed that most facial displays were not evolutionary adaptations, but vestiges or accidents. Alan Fridlund, Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View (Cambridge, 1994), 15
5. For a valuable, nuanced discussion of this point see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2003), 159-79
6. Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness (New York, 1962-63), 1:248
7. The recent rise of interest in Tomkins's work in the humanities can be credited to the late Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick who, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC, 2003), made the case for the value of Tomkins's nonintentionalist (or materialist) ideas for theorizing affect
8. I offer a critique of Tomkins's and Sedgwick's ideas about affect in From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, NJ, 2007), chap. 4
9. Sigmund Freud, "The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" (1909) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London, 1953-74), 10:149-289. For Freud, it is because Hans fears the powerful father's retaliation against his own unmasterable hostility that he (the child) identifies with him to the point of incorporating the father's aggression. That incorporated aggression fuels the child's superego, so that the aggressivity of the scenario is played out in the mode of the subject's experience of a relentless self-reproach. Aggressivity, fear, and guilt on this interpretation thus have a deep connection, one that is lost in modern interpretations of fear, such as those by Tomkins and Ekman
10. J. Wolpe and S. Rachman, "Psychoanalystic 'Evidence': A Critique Based on Freud's Case of Little Hans," Journal of Mental and Nervous Diseases 131 (1960): 135-48
11. I use the word "intentionalist" here to describe the position of Freud and all those in the emotion field who call themselves "appraisal theorists" or "cognitivists," because the term "intentionalist" captures what I consider to be the most fundamental aspect of their position, namely, the idea that the emotions are to be understood as states of mind that are directed toward objects and that include cognitions, judgments, and beliefs about the world. "Cognitivism" has been criticized by philosopher of science Paul Griffiths, and others, for two basic reasons: (1) Cognitivism is held to be captive to a particular picture of cognition according to which it involves making propositions or holding "propositional attitudes," thereby tying cognition to the human capacity for producing linguistic propositions; cognitivism thus appears to create a sharp divide between humans and nonhuman animals. (2) Cognitivism is accused of ignoring developments in the life sciences, especially the neurosciences. See Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago, 1997), 1-3. Both criticisms seem to me to miss the mark. There is no reason to deny some sort of capacity for cognition and intentionality to nonhuman animals, and, as I try to show in this paper, the reproach that philosophers tend to ignore the findings of the life sciences can serve to distract attention from the inadequacies of the scientific evidence on offer. The conflict between intentionalist and nonintentionalist accounts of emotion, including crucially the nonintentionalist views of Tomkins, Ekman, and others, is the topic of my recent book, From Guilt to Shame
12. See also Ruth Leys, "Navigating the Genealogies of Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview with Ruth Leys," in Models of Mind and Consciousness, Special Issue, University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (Spring 2010):42-65, forthcoming
13. As Tomkins wrote in his vision of the "humanomaton" or emotional "animal-machine": "There must be built into such a machine a number of responses which have self-rewarding and self-punishing characteristics. This means that these responses are inherently acceptable or inherently unacceptable. These are essentially aesthetic characteristics of the affective responses - and in one sense not further reducible. . . . If and when the humanomaton learns English, we would require a spontaneous reaction to joy or excitement of the sort 'I like this,' and to fear and shame and distress, 'Whatever this is, I don't care for it.' . . . There must be introduced into the machine a critical gap between the conditions which instigate the self-rewarding or self-punishing responses which maintain them, which turn them off, and the 'knowledge' of these conditions. The machine initially would only know that it liked some of its own responses and disliked some of its own responses but not that they might be turned on, or off, and not how to turn them on, or off, or up, or down in intensity"; Silvan S. Tomkins and Samuel Messick, Computer Simulation of Personality: Frontier of Psychological Theory (New York, 1963), 18-19
14. Donald Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self (New York, 1992), 66. Griffiths likewise remarks: "The affect program phenomena are a standing example of the emotional or passionate. They are sources of motivation not integrated into the system of beliefs or desires. The characteristic properties of the affect program system states, their informational encapsulation, and their involuntary triggering, necessitate the introduction of a concept of mental state separate from the concepts of belief and desire"
15. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 243. Or as he also states: "The psychoevolved emotions occur in a partially informationally encapsulated modular subsystem of the mind/brain. The processes that occur therein, the 'beliefs' of the system and the 'judgements' it makes, are not beliefs and judgements of the person in the traditional sense, any more than the 'beliefs' and 'judgements' of the balance mechanisms fed by the inner ear"
16. Paul E. Griffiths, "The Degeneration of the Cognitive Theory of Emotions," Philosophical Psychology 2, no. 3 (1989): 298
17. Because the affect programs are said to be located in primitive, subcortical parts of the brain that function independently of knowledge, they are held to bypass the slower cognitive pathways of the higher cortical centers and respond instead in a quick and mindless way to the innate or learned triggers that elicit them. Much recent work on the emotions has been devoted to validating such an approach to the emotions, which has also found its way into the popular media. For example, in a recent article in Newsweek about how people respond to terrorist threats and other situations we find this statement: "The strongest human emotions are fear and anxiety. Crucial to survival, they are programmed into the brain's most primitive regions, allowing them to trump rationality but not for rationality to override them"; "When It's Head Versus Heart, the Heart Wins," Newsweek, February 11, 2008, 35
18. Brian Massumi, "Fear (The Spectrum Said)," Positions 13, no. 1 (2005): 37
19. For Ekman's account of the origins of his research on the emotions see his "Afterword: Universality of Emotional Expression? A Personal History of the Dispute," in Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed., with an introduction, afterword, and commentaries by Paul Ekman (Oxford, 1998), 363-93. (I shall be using this edition of Darwin's Expression throughout this paper.) Ekman here states that at the start of his career he did not have a strong commitment as to whether or not the emotions are universal, but that his goal was to "settle the matter decisively. Margaret Mead later wrote that it was outrageous for me to have such a goal" (365)
20. For an important assessment from the 1950s see J. S. Bruner and R. Tagiuri, "The Perception of People," in Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. G. Lindzey (Reading, MA, 1954), 2:634-56
21. In "What Are the Primary Affects?" (1964)
22. reprinted in Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, ed. Virginia Demos (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 217-62, Tomkins and his co-author Robert McCarter reported the results of their own experiments on the judgment of selected facial expressions, experiments carried out in order to test the thesis of universality of the emotions. This paper served as a blueprint for Ekman's subsequent research. As the latter stated: "Tomkins . . . provided a theoretical rationale for studying the face as a means of learning about personality and emotion. He also showed that observers could obtain very high agreement in judging emotion if the facial expressions were carefully selected to show what he believes are the innate facial affects. . . . Tomkins greatly influenced myself and [Carroll] Izard, helping each of us plan our initial cross-cultural studies of facial expression. The resulting evidence of universality in facial expression rekindled interest in this topic in psychology and anthropology"
23. Paul Ekman, "The Argument and Evidence About Universals in Facial Expressions of Emotion," in Handbook of Social Psychopathology, ed. H. Wagner and A. Manstead (London, 1989), 145
24. For accounts of Ekman's neurocultural model of the emotions see, for example, Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, "Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception," Psychiatry 32, no. 1 (1969): 88-106
25. Paul Ekman, "Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion," in J. Cole, ed., The Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1971 (Lincoln, NE, 1972), 207-83
26. and "Biological and Cultural Contributions to Body and Facial Movement in the Expression of Emotion," in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, 1980), 73-99, 100-101
27. Darwin, Expression, 19
28. Of course, "instantaneous" is a relative term in photography, as Phillip Prodger makes clear in Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (Oxford, 2003)
29. Phillip Prodger, "Illustration as Strategy in Charles Darwin's 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,'" in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir (Stanford, 1998), 156
30. "With exposure times in the tens of seconds, a 'true' rendering of emotional expression would have required the subjects to achieve naturally a representative emotional expression, then hold it unadulterated for the photographer to record on film. This could not be done reliably or with precision"; Phillip Prodger, "Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ibid., 177
31. Johann Caspar Lavater, Von der Physiognomik (1772)
32. cited by Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit, 2004), 49-50. In his book, Gray makes many illuminating observations about the ideals of immobility, stasis, and repose in Lavater's physiognomic-observational strategies, ideals that likewise inform the Tomkins-Ekman paradigm - as if only the human form stripped of vital, intentional actions and movements can reveal the authentic, primordial essence of the natural human being
33. Prodger, "Illustration as Strategy," 149
34. "Until a systematic means of coding facial behaviors had been widely accepted and such drawings as well as a large number of actual photographs and films have been scored, there is no way of knowing to what extent they represented fantasy or reality"; Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Phoebe Ellsworth, Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings (New York, 1972), 50-51
35. For Ekman's denial that his approach bears any relation to the older physiognomic tradition see his "Duchenne and Facial Expression of Emotion," in Duchenne de Boulogne: The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, ed. and trans. R. Andrew Cuthbertson (Paris, 1991), 271. But Ekman's fundamental assumption that we can draw a distinction between natural and cultural facial expressions is the physiognomic assumption. In a recent study, François Delaporte credits Duchenne with being the discoverer of the means of distinguishing the authentic from the feigned emotional sign - for example, the simulated versus the genuine smile - and appears to defend that distinction in terms similar to those of Ekman, whose work he cites
36. See François Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions, ed. Todd Myers, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Stanford, CA, 2008)
37. For a superb historical discussion of Duchenne's work that critiques Delaporte's interpretation of Duchenne's project, see Stéphanie Dupouy, Le visage au scalpel: L'expression faciale dans l'oeil des savants (1750-1880), PhD thesis, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2007. My thanks to the author for allowing me to read her thesis, and to Lorraine Daston and Andreas Mayer for alerting me to its existence
38. The distinction between "false" versus "true" (or "Duchenne") smiles, a favorite topic of Ekman's, is the target of Alan Fridlund's criticisms in his Human Facial Expression, 115-18, 152-55
39. "We believe that some of the impressions of cultural differences in affect display have arisen from a failure to distinguish adequately the pan-cultural elements from the circumstances governing the display of affects which are markedly influenced by social learning and vary within and between cultures. We believe that, while the facial muscles which move when a particular affect is aroused are the same across cultures, the evoking stimuli, the linked affects, the display rules and the behavioral consequences all can vary enormously from one culture to another"; Paul Ekman and Walter V. Friesen, "The Repertoire of Nonverbal Behavior: Categories, Origins, Usage, and Coding," Semiotica 1 (1969): 73
40. See Ekman's early discussion of this issue in "A Methodological Discussion of Nonverbal Behavior," Journal of Psychology 43 (1957): 141-49. Ekman recognized that still photographs "freeze" expressions by slicing them out of what is naturally a sequence of movements in time. But in response to complaints by Jerome Bruner and R. Tagiuri, who criticized the use of such photographs because, as Ekman quoted them as stating, "'judgment based on a frozen millisecond of exposure is not representative of the type of judgment made in naturally occurring conditions,'" Ekman argued that if the purpose of the study did not require a judgment of sequential behavior, then still photographs "may be useful for some research questions"
41. Ekman, Friesen, and Ellsworth, Emotion in the Human Face, 49. He especially defended the use of posed still photographs for their savings in cost and ease of use, remarking that in the case of posed facial behavior, where the poser holds the pose for the camera, "a still will provide the same information as five seconds of film or videotape of the frozen position. Certainly, there is considerable evidence that the frozen few milliseconds of a still photograph can provide quite a bit of information" (49) - which was of course precisely the point at issue
42. Tomkins's theory of "blends" plays an important role here. He and Ekman assume the existence of a core set of affects whose combination ("blends") produce more complex emotions, with the result that much of the time the face expresses an admixture of two or more of the basic emotions. Theirs is an atomistic, combinatorial approach that conceives of the emotions as made up of a limited number of distinct categories or units (or "kinds") out of which the "higher" affects are built up. The approach has the advantage of explaining away any negative results in judgment studies as "confusions" on the part of observers owing to the existence in posed photographs of facial expressions of blends resulting from local, cultural conditions. For the argument about "confusions" see Tomkins and McCarter, "What Are the Primary Affects?"
43. Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Silvan S. Tomkins, "Facial Affect Scoring Technique: A First Validity Study," Semiotica 3 (1971): 37-53. Thus if we follow Ekman's writings during these important early years when he was attempting to lay the foundations of a science of emotion, we find him arguing that the facial expressions in the photographs he employed in his experiments must have been free of cultural taint because they were universally recognized. At the same time he suggested that those facial expressions were universally recognized because they were free of cultural taint. Similarly, Ekman presented FAST as if it were consequent on the finding that photographs of posed expressions could be distinguished correctly by literate and preliterate observers. But there is an important sense in which observers from literate and preliterate cultures were capable of distinguishing these affects correctly because FAST (plus subjective intuition) had already predetermined the "correct" or representative posed facial expressions to be used in his judgment tests. Ekman, Friesen, and Tomkins decided from the outset to develop FAST in terms of emotion categories (happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, and fear) rather than emotion dimensions (pleasantness-unpleasantness, active-passive, and so on). This decision was based on several considerations, including the claim that the cross-cultural research carried out by Ekman and Izard had suggested the existence of universal categories of facial expression. To develop FAST, Ekman, Friesen, and Tomkins divided the face into three areas (brows-forehead area; eyes-lids-bridge of nose; lower face, consisting of cheek-nose-mouth-chin-jaw). Lists of facial components within each of the three facial areas for each of the six emotions were then compiled. The authors based these lists on the past literature as well as on their own observations and intuitions. To specify the appearance of the relevant components, they obtained "visual-photographic" definitions of each item by requesting several actors to pose the facial movements within each facial area (not the emotions) after they were told and shown what to do with the face. FAST thus consisted of three sets of photographs, one set for each facial area. The faces to be scored by FAST were selected on theoretical grounds to show only one of the six hypothesized discrete emotions from photographs of posed expressions used by investigators in the past (including most of those used by Ekman and Friesen in their cross-cultural studies), each of which had obtained at least seventy percent agreement among observers about the presence of a single emotion. These selected photographs - the aim was to obtain ten pictures of each of the six emotions, although this proved impossible for disgust and fear - were projected life-size onto a screen, which was masked to show only one facial area at a time, and trained scorers, using the relevant set of FAST items, scored them by selecting the FAST item that best matched the area in question. The results for reliability and validity were found to be "very encouraging" for predicting the recognition of posed faces, although FAST had relatively poor success with fear faces as compared to the other emotion-category faces, owing to the problem of blends. FAST's applicability to spontaneous expressions was justified on the grounds that, since it had been shown by Ekman and Friesen that posed expressions could be judged as showing the same emotions across different cultures, posed expressions must have some intrinsic relation to spontaneous ones. "In light of this evidence," the authors concluded, "it seems reasonable to assume that posed behavior differs little from spontaneous facial behavior in form" (53)
44. See for example Paul Ekman and Erika Rosenberg, eds., What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2005), where the issue of posing comes up frequently
45. Paul Ekman, E. Richard Sorenson, and Wallace V. Friesen, "Pan-Cultural Elements in Facial Displays of Emotion," Science 164 (1969), 86
46. Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, "Constants Across Cultures in the Face and Emotion," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 (1971): 128 n. 6. Or as he also observed: "Posed behaviors differ little from spontaneous facial behavior in form. . . . Posed differs from spontaneous facial behavior in duration, in the lack of attempt to control or otherwise moderate the behavior, and in the frequency of single emotion faces compared to blend faces"
47. Ekman, Friesen, and Tomkins, "Facial Affect Scoring Technique: A First Validity Study," 53
48. Norman L. Munn, "The Effect of Knowledge of the Situation Upon Judgment of Emotion from Facial Expressions," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 35 (1940): 325
49. The phrase "spontaneity without conventionalization" is William A. Hunt's in his discussion of Munn's work in "Recent Developments in the Field of Emotion," Psychological Bulletin 38 (1941): 261
50. Munn, "The Effect of Knowledge of the Situation Upon Judgment of Emotion from Facial Expressions," 326
51. Hunt, "Recent Developments in the Field of Emotion," 261
52. "For this is what Ekman has demonstrated. Given a limited range of semantically designated emotions - grief, happiness, anger, disgust, it is possible to persuade members of different cultures to produce simulations which are mutually intelligible between these cultures," Mead wrote in "Margaret Mead Calls 'Discipline-centric' Approach to Research an 'Example of the Appalling State of the Human Sciences,'" review of Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, ed. Paul Ekman (New York, 1973)
53. Journal of Communication 25, no. 10 (1975): 212. This left open the question why, if Ekman's experimental findings could be trusted, everybody, regardless of cultural origin, could be "persuaded" to recognize such "simulated" or theatricalized expressions. Mead was prepared to entertain the idea that there must be some universal, presumably innate, element involved, perhaps of the kind Ekman had postulated between the nervous system and specific facial muscles. Recent criticisms by James A. Russell and others of Ekman and Friesen's methods in such cross-cultural studies have now cast doubt on Ekman's universalist claims (more on this later in the essay). Ekman for his part expressed surprise that Mead was willing to suggest that "what is innate would be apparent only in simulation and not in actual emotional experience" and suggested that the answer must come from data on spontaneous expressions of the kind he had first reported in his hidden camera study of American and Japanese students
54. Paul Ekman, "Biological and Cultural Contributions to Body and Facial Movement," in The Anthropology of the Body, ed. J. Blacking (London, 1977), 69
55. For Ekman's account of his difficult relations with Mead see also his "Afterword: Universality of Emotional Expression?" where he characterized Mead's review of his 1973 book as a "denunciation" (364). Mead herself adopted a communicative analysis of facial expression, with a debt to cybernetics and kinesics, an analysis that appears closer to recent "paralanguage" theories of communication of the kind advocated by Fridlund than to Ekman's basic emotions approach. Mead's position on this topic was closely aligned with the work of the anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell (1918-1994), who denied the existence of universals in facial and other bodily gestures and movements. Birdwhistell emphasized the need to study body movement as a "language" or form of communication between people, using film and videotape as methods of recording in naturalistic settings and without experimental intervention or manipulation. Birdwhistell's concern with methodology, especially the sensitivity of subjects to being observed, led him to rule out having the cameraman present when they were being filmed. As reported by Martha Davis, a member of Birdwhistell's research circle, by the end of the 1970s, though, Ekman's attempts to apply traditional experimental methods to the study of nonverbal behavior had gained traction, not least because the microstudies of behavior of the kind Birdwhistell advocated took enormous lengths of time compared to Ekman's quicker, more economical procedures. Birdwhistell's criticisms of Ekman's methods, assumptions, and findings ended in the former's defeat when Ekman replaced Birdwhistell in the decisive role of arbiter of the National Institute of Mental Health grants for research on nonverbal communication. Ekman's triumph over Birdwhistell - a triumph at once methodological, intellectual, and institutional - sealed the destiny of emotion research in the United States for the next several decades. What is new today is that criticisms of Ekman's approach are being raised by researchers who have been formed by and trained in Ekman's presuppositions and research methods, and it will be interesting to see whether these critics will have any better success than did Birdwhistell in challenging and dislodging them. See Martha Davis, "Film Projectors as Microscopes: Ray L. Birdwhistell and Microanalysis of Interaction (1955-1975)," Visual Anthropology Review 17, no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 2001-02): 39-49
56. "A limitation of these cross-cultural experiments is that the facial expressions presented were not genuine but posed by subjects instructed to show a particular emotion or to move particular facial muscles. One interpreter of this literature [referring to Mead] suggested that the universality in judgments of facial expression might be limited to just such stereotyped, posed expressions"; Paul Ekman and Harriet Oster, "Facial Expressions of Emotion," Annual Review of Psychology 30 (1979): 530. Again in 1987 Ekman acknowledged as one of three limitations of his cross-cultural studies the fact that "the facial expressions were posed, and Mead (1975) argued that establishing that posed expressions are universal need not imply that spontaneous facial expressions are universal"
57. Paul Ekman et al., "Universals and Cultural Differences in the Judgments of Facial Expressions of Emotion," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53, no. 4 (1987): 713
58. Ekman, "Universals and Cultural Differences in the Judgments of Facial Expressions of Emotion," 713
59. Ekman, "Biological and Cultural Contributions to Body and Facial Movement" (1977), 69
60. This statement and Ekman's discussion of Mead's criticisms were omitted when in 1980 Ekman republished his paper in Rorty, Explaining Emotions, 73-101. In his 1980 version he placed his criticisms of Mead in note 7, 100
61. Richard Lazarus, "A Laboratory Approach to the Dynamics of Psychological Stress," American Psychologist 19 (1966): 404
62. For a discussion of the use of this film by Lazarus and Mardi J. Horowitz to study stress and of the question of the image, violence, and appraisal in the development of the diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, see Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 93-122
63. Over the years Ekman has given several descriptions of this study. The basic sources are Paul Ekman, "Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion," in J. Cole, ed., Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1971 (Lincoln, NE, 1972), 207-83
64. Ekman, Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review, 215-218
65. Wallace V. Friesen, Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions in a Social Situation: An Experimental Test of the Concept of Display Rules (PhD diss., University of California, San Francisco, 1972)
66. Already in 1981 Tomkins cited Ekman's Japanese-American study as a "brilliant experiment" demonstrating the complex relationships between pancultural universalities and "relativistic transformations" in Silvan S. Tomkins, "The Quest for Primary Motives: Biography and Autobiography of an Idea," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 41, no. 2 (1981): 313
67. More recently, emotion theorist Paul E. Griffiths has also endorsed Ekman's experiment in What Emotions Really Are, 53-54
68. In 1990, Andrew Ortony and Terence J. Turner predicted that the basic emotions approach would not lead to significant progress in the field. See A. Ortony and T. J. Turner, "What's So Basic About Basic Emotions?" Psychological Review 97 (1990): 315-31
69. R. Buck, The Communication of Emotion (New York, 1984), 20
70. Paul Ekman, "Expression and the Nature of Emotion," in Approaches to Emotion, ed. P. Ekman and L. Scherer (Hillsdale, NJ, 1984), 321
71. Paul Ekman, Richard J. Davidson, and Wallace V. Friesen, "The Duchenne Smile: Emotional Expression," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 351
72. Fridlund, Human Facial Expression, 291
73. Cf. Alan J. Fridlund, "The New Ethology of Human Facial Expression," in James A. Russell and José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, eds., The Psychology of Facial Expression (Cambridge, 1997), 103-29
74. Ekman and his colleagues subsequently carried out two partial replications of the 1972 study of spontaneous expressions, though without including cross-cultural comparisons: Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and S. Ancoli, "Facial Signs of Emotional Experience," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (1980): 1125-34
75. and Erika L. Rosenberg and Paul Ekman, "Coherence Between Expressive and Experiential Systems in Emotion," Cognition and Emotion 8 (1994): 201-29
76. reprinted with an afterword commenting on Fridlund's critique in Ekman and Rosenberg, What the Face Reveals, 63-88
77. For criticisms of these later experiments see José-Miguel Fernández-Dols and Maria-Angeles Ruiz-Belda, "Spontaneous Facial Behavior During Intense Emotional Episodes: Artistic Truth and Optical Truth," in Russell and Fernández-Dols, The Psychology of Facial Expression, 260-62
78. For a recent assessment of the Fridlund-Ekman debate that finds little evidence for Ekman's emotion-expression link see Brian Parkinson, "Do Facial Movements Express Emotions or Communicate Motives?" Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 4 (2005): 278-311
79. James A. Russell, "Is There Universal Expression of Emotion From Facial Expression? A Review of the Cross-Cultural Studies," Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 102-41
80. Ekman replied to Russell's criticisms in "Strong Evidence for Universals in Facial Expression: Reply to Russell's Mistaken Critique," Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 268-87
81. and Russell replied in turn in "Facial Expressions of Emotion: What Lies Beyond Minimal Universality?" Psychological Bulletin 118 (1995): 378-81
82. For another of Ekman's replies to the renewal of the debate over universals and his emotion theory see his "Expression or Communication About Emotion," in Genetic, Ethnological, and Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development: Essays in Honor of Dr. Daniel G. Freedman, eds., N. Segal, G. E. Weisfeld, and C. C. Weisfeld (Washington, DC, 1997)
83. See also Russell and Fernández-Dols, The Psychology of Facial Expression, for a useful overview of the issues at stake in this debate
84. and Pamela J. Naab and James A. Russell, "Judgments of Emotion from Spontaneous Facial Expressions of New Guineans," Emotion 7 (2007): 736-44, in which the authors examined the recognition of emotion in twenty "spontaneous" expressions from Papua New Guinea, previously photographed, coded, and labeled by Ekman in 1980. The results showed that spontaneous expressions do not achieve the level of recognition obtained by posed expressions
85. For a statement of Russell's views concerning the role of "core affect" in the construction of emotional experience see James A. Russell, "Core Affect and the Psychological Construction of Emotion," Psychological Review 110, no. 1 (2003): 145-72
86. Fridlund characterizes his position as a "paralanguage" theory of facial expression in order to emphasize that in humans the role of facial movements is not to express inner emotions but to accompany and supplement speech. Studies of "audience effects" by Fernández-Dols and his colleagues showing, for example, that Olympic gold medalists produce many facial expressions during the medal ceremony but smile almost exclusively when interacting with the audience and officials, have been held to confirm the situational-transactional character of facial expressions. Fernández-Dols and Ruiz-Belda, "Spontaneous Facial Behavior During Intense Emotional Episodes: Artistic Truth and Optical Truth," 255-74. Fridlund also situates his analysis of facial expression in the context of the post-Tinbergen and post-Lorenz "new ethology," which likewise emphasizes the communicative value of nonhuman animal displays. From the perspective of the new ethology, displays do not necessarily provide "readouts" of internal motivation because it would not be strategically advantageous for animals to automatically signal their future actions
87. In a large literature on animal displays, whose role in the vicissitudes of emotion research will have be taken into account in any future history of post-World War II theoretical and emotional approaches to the affects, see especially J. R. Krebs and R. Dawkins, "Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation," in J. Krebs and N. B. Davies, eds., Behavioral Ecology (Oxford, 1984), 380-402
88. R. Hinde, "Was 'The Expression of Emotions' a Misleading Phrase?" Animal Behavior 33 (1985): 985-92
89. and R. Hinde, "Expression and Negotiation," in G. Zivin, ed., The Development of Expressive Behavior: Biology-Environment Interaction (New York, 1985): 103-16
90. I have found the following review articles especially useful: Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Are Emotions Natural Kinds?" Perspectives on Psychological Science 1 (2006): 28-58
91. Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion," Personality and Social Psychology Review 10, no. 1 (2006): 20-46
92. Lisa Feldman Barrett et al., "Of Mice and Men: Natural Kinds of Emotions in the Mammalian Brain? A Response to Panksepp and Izard," Perspectives on Psychological Science 2 (2007): 297-312 (an article that offers a valuable critique, along lines similar to those stated by Fridlund, of the widespread mistake in emotion research of relying on a hierarchical brain concept, such as Paul MacLean's "triune" brain concept, according to which in humans the neocortex sits atop a more ancient and primitive subcortex "like icing on an already baked cake" [302] - an assumption that leads to the idea that the phylogenetically "older" amygdala and other subcortical structures subserve the "lower" or more primitive emotional functions independently of higher cortical processing)
93. and Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kevin N. Oscher, and James J. Gross, "On the Automaticity of Emotion," in J. Bargh, ed., Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Mental Processes (New York, 2007), 173-217. As an alternative to the natural kinds approach to the affects proposed by Ekman, Barrett proposes, in terms similar to those offered by Russell, that emotion is a psychological event constructed from the more basic elements of "core affect" and conceptual knowledge
94. See, for example, Kristen A. Lindquist and Lisa Feldman Barrett, "Constructing Emotion: The Experience of Fear as a Conceptual Act," Psychological Science 19, no. 9 (2008): 898-903
95. Barrett, "Are Emotions Natural Kinds?" 38
96. Russell, "Is There Universal Expression of Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of the Cross-Cultural Studies," 114
97. Ian Hacking, "By What Links are the Organs Excited?" Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1998, 11. Hacking here points to the role played by unconscious demands and expectations in the production of facial expressions in terms that are compatible with Fridlund's dramaturgical interpretation of facial displays as determined by (conscious and unconscious) social motives. Seen in this light, Ekman's forced-choice labeling procedures, which oblige experimental subjects to identify emotions in photographs of posed expressions by selecting one label from a limited set of emotion terms, can be understood as methods designed to suppress the social-relational dimension involved in their making by "objectivizing" the emotions in the image and in the "correct" judgment of the objective truth of those representations. Russell has demonstrated that if subjects are encouraged to give a description of such pictures of expression in their own words, they don't use categorical emotion terms but tend to produce a narrative account in terms of the situation they think or imagine is being enacted in the image
98. Russell, "Facial Expressions of Emotion: What Lies Beyond Minimal Universality?" 378-81
99. FACS was modeled on an earlier coding system made by the anatomist C. H. Hjortso. FACS is a "sterile," noninterpretive system that focuses on the visible changes (action units) caused by the underlying facial muscles. The "theoretical" part of Ekman's coding system is EMFACS (Emotion FACS), which makes "predictions" (or pronouncements) about which emotions are expressed by which concatenation of action units. The risk has always been that the "predictions" in EMFACS will tend to get folded into FACS training, since Ekman believes that the truth of EMFACS has been definitively revealed. It is worth noting that the iterative process used by Ekman to select representative portrayals of emotions has not in fact yielded a specific physically characterizable signal for each emotion. Instead, for each emotion a range of signals achieves varying degrees of agreement. For example, in Ekman and Friesen's Pictures of Facial Affect, sixty-five different facial signals for anger are specified, yet "no theoretical rationale for this variety has been offered"; James A. Russell, Jo-Anne Bachorowski, and José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, "Facial and Vocal Expressions of Emotion," Annual Review of Psychology 54 (2003): 333
100. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 1999), 62
101. I take my subtitle "Have No Fear" from Damasio's subchapter heading "Have No Fear" in The Feeling of What Happens, 62
102. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 53-54
103. Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York, 1996)
104. R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, H. Damasio, and A. Damasio, "Impaired Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expressions Following Bilateral Amygdala Damage to the Human Amygdala," Nature 372 (15 December 1994): 669-72. The patient was originally identified as "SM," and this is how she is referred to in most subsequent publications, although in his book, The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio calls the patient "S." I shall refer to her as SM
105. Ralph Adolphs et al., "Fear and the Human Amygdala," Journal of Neuroscience 15, no. 9 (September 1995): 5879-87
106. Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, "The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment," Nature 393 (June 1998): 470-73
107. See also Ralph Adolphs and Daniel Tranel, "Emotion Recognition and the Human Amygdala," in The Amygdala: A Functional Analysis, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2000), 587-630. In these experiments on SM, ratings of approachability and trustworthiness were analyzed for the fifty faces to which normal controls had assigned the most negative ratings, and for the fifty most positive faces. Subjects with bilateral amygdala damage rated the fifty most negative faces more positively than did either normal controls or patients with unilateral amygdala damage. All subject groups gave similar ratings to the fifty most positive faces. On the basis of the results, the researchers suggested that "the human amygdala triggers socially and emotionally relevant information in response to visual stimuli. The amygdala's role appears to be of special importance for social judgment of faces that are normally classified as unapproachable and untrustworthy, consistent with the amygdala's demonstrated role in processing threatening and aversive stimuli"
108. Adolphs, Tranel, and Damasio, "The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment," 472
109. As two recent critiques of Damasio's report of the case of SM (or "S") and other neuroscientific studies of the relationship between facial expression and emotion make clear, when they emphasize the bracketing or loss of the social-interpretive dimension of the emotions in Ekman's standardized, image-based approach: Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago, 2006), 28-39
110. and John McClain Watson, "From Interpretation to Identification: A History of Facial Images in the Sciences of Emotion," History of the Human Sciences 17, no. 1 (2004): 29-51. The latter rightly observes that FACS images "enable researchers to introduce reliability and consistency into their investigation but it is important to remember that these advantages are procured only by bracketing the conceptual quandaries so thoroughly detailed by earlier researchers" (45)
111. Already in 1997, in a discussion of the existing literature on the amygdala's role in the evaluation of emotional stimuli, Elizabeth Phelps raised questions about some of the more extreme claims being made about amygdala-damaged patients, pointing out that such patients are different but that their social deficits are subtle and not as dramatic as had been suggested. She proposed that the amygdala seemed to be activated whenever stimuli were arousing. E. A. Phelps and A. K. Anderson, "Emotional Memory: What Does the Amygdala Do?" Current Biology 7 (1997): R312-R314
112. See also Adam K. Anderson and Elizabeth A. Phelps, "Is the Human Amygdala Critical for the Subjective Experience of Emotion? Evidence of Intact Dispositional Affect in Patients with Amygdala Lesions," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 14, no. 5 (2002): 709-20
113. and Elizabeth A. Phelps, "Emotion and Cognition: Insights from Studies of the Human Amygdala," Annual Review of Psychology 57 (2006): 27-53
114. In a large and rapidly expanding literature, see esp. Ralph Adolphs, James A. Russell, and Daniel Tranel, "A Role for the Human Amygdala in Recognizing Emotional Arousal from Unpleasant Stimuli," Psychological Science 10 (1999): 167-71
115. R. Adolphs et al., "Recognition of Facial Emotion in Nine Individuals with Bilateral Amygdala Damage," Neuropsychologia 37 (1999): 1111-17
116. R. Adolphs et al., "A Mechanism for Impaired Fear Recognition After Amygdala Damage," Nature 433 (6 January 2005): 68-72
117. Ralph Adolphs and Michael Spezio, "Role of the Amygdala in Processing Visual Stimuli," Progress in Brain Research 156 (2006): 363-78
118. D. Tranel et al., "Altered Experience of Emotion Following Bilateral Amygdala Damage," Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 11, no. 3 (2006): 219-32
119. Michael L. Spezio et al., "Amygdala Damage Impairs Eye Contact During Conversations with Real People," Journal of Neuroscience 27, no. 15 (2007): 3994-97
120. Ralph Adolphs, "Fear, Faces, and the Human Amygdala," Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18 (2008): 166-72
121. Matthias Gamer and Christian Buchel, "Amygdala Activation Predicts Gaze Toward Fearful Eyes," Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 28 (2009): 9123-26. In a recent review of the newer results Adolphs comments: "In summary, the model built by the early lesion and functional imaging results, in which the amygdala was critically involved in the recognition of fear but much less so, if at all, in the recognition of other emotions, has given way to a more complex picture in which fear is but one example of a broader category of stimuli that can recruit the amygdala. . . . Thus the amygdala cannot be conceived as a simple 'fear generator' or even as a 'fear processor'; it plays roles in both the experience and the recognition of a range of negative emotional stimuli, as well as in certain highly arousing positive stimuli. . . . Consistent findings of amygdala involvement in processing fear-related stimuli do not mean that it is dedicated to fear-related stimuli. . . . The amygdala, or parts thereof, acts as a detector of salience or relevance."
122. Andrea S. Heberlein and Ralph Adolphs, "Neurobiology of Emotional Recognition: Current Evidence for Shared Substrates," in Fundamentals of Social Neuroscience, ed., E. Harmon-Jones and P. Winkielman (New York, 2007), 38-39. Of course, the introduction of the notion of "salience" raises the familiar epistemological problem of the frame or the assessment of relevance - in other words, the problem of meaning
123. See especially Paul J. Whalen et al., "Masked Presentations of Emotional Facial Expressions Modulate Amygdala Activity without Explicit Knowledge," The Journal of Neuroscience 18, no. 1 (1998): 411-18
124. M. Davis and P. J. Whalen, "The Amygdala: Vigilance and Emotion," Molecular Psychiatry 6 (2001): 13-34
125. Paul J. Whalen et al., "Human Amgydala Responsivity to Masked Fearful Eye Whites," Science 306 (2004): 2061
126. and Paul J. Whalen, "Fear, Vigilance, and Ambiguity: Initial Neuroimaging Studies of the Human Amygdala," Current Directions in Psychological Science 7 (1998): 177-88, where Whalen observes with reference to Phoebe Ellsworth's appraisal views that "vigilance and emotion are not so much entities that reside within the amygdala as they are processes set in motion by amygdala activation" (183) and concludes: "Most theories of amygdala function, and thus discussions of amygdala neuroimaging results, highlight its role in the production of fear states. Clear animal and human experimental evidence supports this view. Yet such a view may unnecessarily compartmentalize amygdala function, leading us to a categorical understanding of what may be a continuous system. The utility of invoking a process such as vigilance rather than an entity such as fear to explain amygdala function is that it might speak to a greater portion of our daily experience. . . . The present theory offers a more pervasive and generalized role for the amygdala in vigilance evoked by associative ambiguity to explain its response to a wide variety of biologically relevant stimuli" (185). In a recent paper, Whalen draws attention to new experiments suggesting that the stimuli to which the amygdala responds do not even have to be biologically relevant to the organism, but that uncertainty or unpredictability is enough to activate the amygdala
127. Paul J. Whalen, "The Uncertainty of It All," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 499-500
128. I am not sure where Adolphs now stands on these issues. For a recent statement of his position see Ralph Adolphs, "Perception and Emotion: How We Recognize Facial Expressions," Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2006): 222-26, where the author accepts the idea that the amygdala's role in recognizing facial expressions encompasses a broader, more abstract, or perhaps more dimensional rather than categorical aspect, of the emotions, of which fear is only one instance. But this leaves open the possibility that he is still committed to the idea of the existence of a set of "basic emotions" according to the Tomkins-Ekman paradigm
129. For a relatively recent statement of Damasio's general position on the affects see his Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York, 2003)
130. The compatibility between Ekman's hypostatization of the facial image and the hypostatization of the image in new imaging technologies such as PET and fMRI is striking. In this connection see Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton, 2004), in which the author suggests that PET and fMRI reinforce the notion that we are what our brain images tell us we are
131. In his novel, Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1, Fever and Spear, trans.
132. See Amotz and Avishag Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle (New York, 1997)