Are Emotions Universal?
It all starts with Darwin
In The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals (1872) Darwin stated that “the same state of mind is
expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity . . .” His evidence
for universality was the answers to 16 questions he sent to Englishmen living
or travelling in eight parts of the world: Africa, America, Australia, Borneo,
China, India, Malaysia and New Zealand. The questions asked whether they saw
the same expressions of emotion in these foreign lands as they had known in
Modern Evidence from Literate Cultures
In modern
‘judgment studies’ native subjects from many countries were studied. They were
shown photographs of facial expression and asked to identify what emotion was
shown from a list of six to ten possible choices. If emotions are universal
then people from different countries should ascribe the same emotion to the
same photographs. The figure below shows six of the photographs used by Silvan
Tomkins in 1962:
Data was
collected on 21 literate countries: Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China,
England, Estonia, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan,
Kirghizistan, Malaysia, Scotland, Sweden, Indonesia (Sumatra), Switzerland,
Turkey and the USA and the results suggest that, across all cultures, people
are very good at recognizing happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and
surprise, with happiness, sadness and disgust being judged almost universally
correct.
It may be
objected that limiting the subjects’ choices to a list of ten possible options
increased the likelihood of success and so Izard (1971) allowed people in
Modern
Evidence from Preliterate, Visually Isolated Cultures
But what if we
had all just learnt to have the same facial expressions because of our shared
culture? To answer this criticism the South Fore culture in
The procedure
adopted had been used many years earlier for studying young children who also
can not read. A translator read the person a brief story, and asked the person
to point to the picture which fitted that story and, in general, they chose the
same expressions for each emotion as had the people in the 21 literate cultures
(Ekman & Friesen, 1971). The only exception was that they failed to
distinguish the fear and surprise faces from each other, although both were
distinguished from anger, happiness, sadness and disgust expressions.
In addition the
people of the Fore were videotaped while showing what their face would look
like in a given situation and the videotaped images were then shown to
Americans who once again recognised all of the emotions except fear and
surprise (Ekman, 1972). See below:
Further studies
carried out in this field and challenges to the evidence are reported in
Dalgleish, T., & Power, M. (1999). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion.
In
Conclusion
It seems reasonable
to propose that there are universal facial expressions (at least for the simple
emotions of happiness, anger, disgust, sadness and fear/surprise) and that
these common facial expressions are the result of a common set of basic
emotions that all humans share. That does not mean that expressions will always
occur when emotions are experienced, for we are capable of inhibiting our
expressions. Nor does it mean that emotions will always have been the cause of
a facial expression, for we are capable of fabricating an expression.
It may be
argued that there is no proof of a connection between emotions and facial
expressions. However, while technically true this does run somewhat contrary to
common sense and, more importantly, it also would make it very difficult to
explain why, if we are all feeling different things, we tend to use the same
facial expressions in the same situations.