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Words and faces barely match
Faces and words
Motor patterns of emotion turn up around the world. A crying child gets pulled in close and caressed, and someone who sees rotten food recoils. The words people use for an emotion run on a separate stream, and the two are only loosely tied.
Culture shapes the gap. Many East Asian cultures value being calm, so people do not blurt out or protest, and the face and the words come apart. Some people are more authentic: their motor patterns come out in expressions, and they tell you how they feel.
The unmapped feeling
The feeling itself remains uncharted territory for the field. The conscious feeling of compassion or awe is some mixture of everything happening in the body, along with images and memories, and nobody knows how it all comes together.
William James tried to describe the transcendent experience he had on laughing gas, which led him down the path to understanding spirituality. Words, he found, are tattered fragments that barely touch the real thing.
Why do emotion words and faces diverge so often?
A 2019 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues examined hundreds of studies of facial expressions. It reported that people scowl when angry only about 30 percent of the time, and they scowl at other times too. The review concluded that a single emotion word covers many different facial patterns and bodily states. Each expression depends on the situation, the culture, and the person.
What did William James experience on laughing gas?
William James experimented with nitrous oxide in the 1880s and described the experience in his 1882 essay On Some Hegelisms. He reported a sense of deep metaphysical insight that vanished as the effect wore off. He later discussed such altered states in his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience. James concluded that ordinary waking consciousness is only one type of consciousness.
How did Darwin study emotions in faces?
Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. He used photographs by the French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne, who stimulated facial muscles with electrical current to produce expressions. Darwin also kept notes on his infant son and mailed questionnaires to colonial correspondents around the world. The book contained some of the first photographs used as illustrations in a scientific work.