15 February 2020 | New Scientist | 45Behind the smile
Our grins and frowns may just be tools to
manipulate others, discovers Emma Young
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VERYBODY knows a genuine smile
when they see one. The corners of
the mouth turn up, of course, but
the expression is all in the eyes. Those
wrinkly crow’s feet around the edges are
what distinguish this from an inauthentic
or social smile. They are what make it a sure-
fire sign that someone is happy. Right?
Well, maybe not. And the same goes for all
the other facial expressions of emotion. It may
sound heretical, but psychologists are starting
to question whether these really do reveal
our emotions – or whether they might serve
a more nefarious purpose.
The orthodox view holds that there is a
group of basic emotions – at least six, but
perhaps many more – that all humans display
on their faces in fundamentally the same way.
This means that other people can reliably read
your emotional state from your face. It is an
appealing idea that has influenced everything
from educational practices and behavioural-
learning programmes for children with autism
to emotion-detecting software algorithms.
But now it is being challenged. Some dissenters
believe that facial “expressions” aren’t reliable
guides to our emotions at all, but tools that we
use to manipulate others. If this is correct,
the implications for our social interactions
are enormous.
The idea that patterns of facial muscular
movements express and indicate our
emotions has a long history. It was popularised
by influential 17th-century French artist
Charles Le Brun, a court painter to Louis XIV,
who prescribed the facial configurations for
six “passions”: wonder, love, hatred, desire,
joy and sadness. A couple of centuries later,
based in part on his own experiments, Charles
Darwin wrote that there were universal facial
expressions associated with happiness,
sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise.
Better experimental data appearing to
back this up came in the 1960s, when US
psychologist Paul Ekman conducted
fieldwork in a remote part of what is now
Papua New Guinea. This was taken as
evidence that these six “emotional
expressions” are indeed shared by people
everywhere. His work was immensely
influential and inspired other studies
seeming to support the idea that the human
face is a universal billboard for our emotions.
Over the past decade, however, freshresearch conducted in small-scale societies
with little access to Western culture has
challenged these conclusions, says Lisa
Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University
in Boston. Take her team’s work with the
Himba, a group of people living in northern
Namibia. Avoiding a perceived weakness in
earlier studies, the researchers didn’t ask the
Himba to match a facial expression to a brief
emotional story or emotion-linked word.
Instead, participants were asked to sort
36 images of posed facial expressions –
the prototypical expressions of anger, fear,
sadness, disgust, happiness and neutral –
into piles by emotion type. Their responses
didn’t support the universal basic emotions
model, whereas those of a US comparison
group did. The team concluded that culture
influences how we perceive facial expressions.
Research by Carlos Crivelli at De Montfort
University in Leicester, UK, has yielded similar
results. In 2013, he made his first trip to
Papua New Guinea to study the people of the
Trobriand Islands, who are subsistence farmers
and fishers. He has found that they too don’t
“see” emotions on faces in the same way that
Westerners do. For example, they interpret