FoundationalConceptsNeuroscience

including emotional feelings, but may not be essential for awareness.
Researching this question is notoriously difficult, if not downright
impossible at this point.
Darwin argued for a universality of emotions, a continuity of ex-
pression extending at least from our primate relatives to us humans.
This implies that the expression of emotion, and the interpretation
of emotional expression, would be universal among humans, across
people from many different cultures. However, in the century after
Darwin’s book, a trend toward understanding human behavior largely
in terms of cultural influences and determinants became dominant.
This so-called constructivist view marginalized the role of biological
universals and posited that even the most basic aspects of emotional
expression depend largely on cultural factors. According to this view,
there is little reason to expect that a smile, or a grimace, is interpreted
in the same way from one culture to another.
In the 1960s, the constructivist versus evolutionary perspective on
emotion was tested by Paul Ekman (b. 1934), who compared the inter-
pretation of facial expressions across different cultures. He found that
facial expressions associated with several basic emotions (joy, anger,
fear, surprise, sadness, disgust) were universal across many human
societies, including tribal people in New Guinea, individuals that
previously had minimal contact with other cultures. Darwin would
have predicted these results, but Darwin’s thoughts on the matter of
human emotion had been largely forgotten by the time Ekman did his
studies. The results piqued the interests of anthropologists and social
scientists and were important in kindling modern studies in the psy-
chology, and later neuroscience, of emotion.
The complexities of human behavior rarely boil down to simple
this-or-that explanations. Clearly, there are deep biological deter-
minants to the experience and expression of human emotion. And