Blackwell Reference Online

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The phrase is not a neutral description of a class of behavior, but a premise: The premise is that our faces express our emotions; our faces are windows to our souls. Put in more modern terms, certain facial actions are assumed to signal basic emotions.The premise may be common sense, but it has turned out to be the single most important idea in the psychology of emotion (see affect and emotional experience). Facial expression is taken to be a visible outcropping of an otherwise hidden process. It is central to a research program (or what might be considered in Kuhn's terms a paradigm) that claims Charles Darwin as its originator, Silvan Tomkins as its modern theorist, and Carroll Izard, Paul Ekman, Wallace Friesen, and dozens of other scientists as its practitioners. The research program offers to make of emotion something measurable and understandable within an evolutionary framework.This program has generated more research than any other in the psychology of emotion (see Fridlund, Ekman, & Oster, 1987). According to its proponents, the evidence is conclusive: Happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, and sadness have been established as basic emotions by showing that members of cultures isolated from each other recognize these seven emotions from each other's facial expressions. The best-known cross-cultural studies ever conducted were designed to demonstrate the ... log in or subscribe to read full text