DURING his voyage around the world on HMS Beagle in the 1830s, Charles Darwin had no difficulty understanding the facial expressions of the many peoples he met, even though their words were incomprehensible to him. In his book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, published in 1872, he argued that facial expressions were universal, evidence 鈥渙f the unity of mankind鈥�.
Yet for much of the past century, most academics have argued just the opposite. The cultural relativist viewpoint dominated, and the idea that social behaviour might have a genetic component was rejected as potentially racist.
I entered the fray in the mid-1960s. To start with, while recognising that neither Darwin nor his opponents had anything like definitive evidence, I leaned slightly towards the cultural relativist position. But I changed my mind after watching hundreds of hours of film taken during the 1950s and early 1960s by Carleton Gajdusek and Richard Sorenson of two isolated, Stone Age cultures in the New Guinea highlands.
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If the cultural relativists were correct, I should have seen expressions on the faces of those people that I had never seen before 鈥� culturally unique expressions. But I didn鈥檛. No matter, a relativist might say: those expressions might seem familiar, but they actually mean something entirely different to what they would in the west. But that also was wrong. Wherever the films showed a person鈥檚 expression in the context of the events they were reacting to, the events fitted with my interpretations of their expression.
I was convinced that Darwin was right, but I needed further evidence that the apparent universality of emotions was not due simply to everyone learning the same repertoire of expressions from the media. I also wanted to know why so many social scientists had interpreted what they had seen as evidence that expressions are culture-specific.
So in 1967 I went to the New Guinea highlands to study the South Fore people, one of the preliterate cultures that Gajdusek had been studying for a decade. These people had had no opportunity to learn expressions from the west. Indeed most of those who took part in my research had never seen an outsider, and none of them had seen magazines, photographs, films or television.
I set them various tasks. In one test, I told them a story and showed them three photographs of human faces, then asked them to pick the one with the facial expression that best suited the story. The stories were simple: friends had come, or they were about to fight. With each story I gave them a different set of three pictures to choose from. The pictures always included the expression that western participants would choose, and two others. So, for example, for the story in which someone was about to fight, they had to decide between an 鈥渁ngry face鈥�, a 鈥渄isgusted face鈥� and a 鈥渟ad face鈥�.
The results were overwhelming: the majority of their judgements were exactly what we would have predicted had they been from any other culture. It didn鈥檛 matter whether the participants were male or female, adults or 5-year-old children, or whether or not they had previously seen outsiders. The sole exception was their failure to distinguish between fear and surprise.
In another task, I again read the participants a simple story, but this time I asked them to use their own face to show the expression that fitted the story. Again, their expressions were as predicted: in response to a story about the death of a child they displayed an expression known universally as sad; in response to a story in which the protagonist prepared to fight they showed an expression known universally as anger.
Why, then, did so many observers believe facial expressions were culture-specific? One answer is that in social situations, most people manage their expressions, and these public 鈥渄isplay rules鈥� are socially learned and culturally variable. Display rules, which tend to become habitual once learned, are used to mask, exaggerate, diminish or inhibit expressions in specific cultural contexts. My colleagues and I believed that these display rules gave observers the impression that emotional expressions were dependent on culture.
In the late 1960s, we gathered evidence to support this explanation when we filmed Japanese students in Tokyo and Americans in Berkeley, California, watching clips of pleasant and unpleasant films. They were unaware of our hidden camera, and as expected they displayed virtually identical expressions regardless of culture. Then halfway through the experiment a scientist in a white coat entered the room, sitting with the students while they continued to watch the film clips.
During this stage we found great differences. In the presence of this authority figure, the Japanese masked negative emotions with positive expressions, with just the subtlest signs of their real reactions to the film sometimes leaking out. The American students, on the other hand, did not mask their expressions. Thus, in private the expressions were universal, in public culturally different.
Another more recent line of study has identified micro expressions 鈥� typically very intense expressions that last for only about 1/15 of a second, sometimes even less. Micro expressions tend to occur when emotion is concealed, either unwittingly by repression, or deliberately by suppression. Most people do not recognise them, although those who are very good at identifying lies are particularly good at this. I have developed a CD that teaches people in under an hour to better recognise micro expressions 鈥� see .
Emotions influence our lives all the time. They can shape the quality of our relationships and they motivate most of our activities. Learning to recognise them on people鈥檚 faces, and to recognise how people conceal them, is useful not only in professions such as policing, psychotherapy, health, education, airport security and public relations. It can benefit all of us. And as Darwin recognised two centuries ago, emotional expressions are not specific to cultures, but have evolved universally.