The world is being flooded with technology designed to monitor our emotions. Amazon’s Alexa is one of many virtual assistants that detect tone and timbre of voice in order to better understand commands. CCTV cameras can track faces through public space, and supposedly detect criminals before they commit crimes. Autonomous cars will one day be able to spot when drivers get road rage, and take control of the wheel.
But there’s a problem. While the technology is cutting-edge, it’s using an outdated scientific concept stating that all humans, everywhere, experience six basic emotions, and that we each express those emotions in the same way. By building a world filled with gadgets and surveillance systems that take this model as gospel, this obsolete view of emotion could end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, as a vast range of human expressions around the world is forced into a narrow set of definable, machine-readable boxes.The science used to underpin most contemporary emotion-detecting technologies began with a grieving teenage boy. Paul Ekman was born in 1934, the child of a pediatrician father and an attorney mother. He spent his youth dreaming of emulating his hero, Ferdinand Magellan, hoping to someday make discoveries that would change the world.When Ekman was 14 years old, his mother’s depression resulted in her suicide. At a 2008 talk at San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum, he discussed how, even at such a young age, he felt he “had to do something to make up for the fact that [he] wasn’t able to rescue her.” His dream of discovery shifted from geography to the uncharted regions of the mind.
Just one year later, in 1948, he dropped out of high school—he was highly intelligent, but frequently clashed with his teachers—to become an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. (At the time, students only needed two completed years of high school to apply to some colleges.) Heavily influenced by Freud, Ekman went on to complete a PhD in psychotherapy, studying the depressed. He was fascinated by nonverbal communication, studying patients’ body language and hand movements. Before long, he realized that his patients represented a biased sample: he was studying the survivors of depression, not those who had succumbed to the worst of their illness. He mused that “the road to understanding human behavior and getting back to help people like [his mother] was not by looking at abnormal behavior but at normal behavior.”Depression was an emotional disorder, so the man who had idolized Magellan finally found his own quest: to discover if all humans experienced a set of common emotions.By this time, the 1960s, Ekman wasn’t the only person to have gone searching. The acclaimed anthropologist Margaret Mead had already spent years traveling the world, demonstrating that cultures express emotions differently. Most famously, Mead had lived during the 1920s on the small island of Ta’ū, in American Samoa, in an effort to discover if the emotional upheaval experienced by American and European adolescents was universal. She found that young Samoan women had none of the strong morality-linked feelings, like anxiety and disgust, that their contemporaries experienced in the United States. For example, it was quite normal for Samoan women in their late teens to engage in guilt-free casual sex before getting married and beginning a family. In 1928, when Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was published, her findings shocked American readers, and provided strong evidence that fundamental human experiences—including emotions—varied from culture to culture.
Mead’s work—finding evidence that emotions, and other social phenomena, were culturally constructed—had a huge influence on 20th-century feminist thought and activism. She promoted the idea that free love was a way to break free of male dominance, and that upbringing, not genetics, played a central role in the way people behaved. After Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead found more and more examples of how the Western way of thinking about emotion didn’t translate to the experience of non-Western, indigenous peoples. Her 1932 book The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe, for example, documented cultural conflicts that had beset a Native American “Plains tribe” (she did not specify which one) as its members moved away, often with difficulty, from traditional practices and toward Western behaviors and emotions.
By the late 1960s, Mead’s views were all but scientific consensus in the West, and emotions were considered far from universal. Ekman had his doubts.
To understand why Ekman had problems with Mead’s research, we can look to Charles Darwin. In 1872, he wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which points out that some instinctual actions—like raising an eyebrow in surprise—are shared by animals and humans. For Darwin, this was further evidence that humans and other animals had some kind of common evolutionary ancestor, as well as that emotions had some kind of biological, innate source. It was also a way to avoid outraging pious Victorians by claiming that they acted like animals; he thought that it would be much more persuasive to do the opposite, and point to cute, humanlike behavior in pets.
In 1955, Mead wrote the foreword to a reprint of Darwin’s essay, but she critiqued it as a historical curiosity. In her opinion, it wasn’t a work that held up in light of more modern research. Darwin’s Expression had a huge influence on Ekman, however—and by the time Expression was republished again in 1998, it was Ekman’s turn to write a foreword. He defended Darwin’s initial hunch, because the consensus had flipped. Innate emotions were in again, and it was Ekman’s research that was responsible.
It should be noted that Darwin was far from the first to suggest that emotions were innate. More than two millennia ago, Aristotle wrote about how “some men, who are in no sense alike, have the same facial expressions.” Nor was Aristotle the only ancient philosopher who thought this way. It was received wisdom throughout antiquity, persisting well into the late 17th century. Artist Charles Le Brun, influenced by Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul, wrote a treatise arguing that high art should make more use of exaggerated facial expressions—and he included sketches of what he considered to be some of the more fundamental expressions. He died before his Méthode Pour Apprendre à Dessiner les Passions was published in 1698, but his sketches had a huge influence on European art theory for centuries afterward.
Sketches of emotional facial expressions, Charles Le Brun, 1698.
Le Brun was drawing on the practice of physiognomy, which stated that not only were faces the gateway to passions but they were also a way to access a person’s soul. Ugliness betrayed sin, and if a person looked like an animal then that individual would have similar attributes to the beast. Physiognomy and its offshoots, like phrenology, remained popular into the 20th century, and provided justification for many popular prejudices. For example, the contents page of US physician James W. Redfield’s 1852 book Comparative Physiognomy gives a list of what would now be regarded as typically racist resemblances: “of Jews to goats,” “of Aztec children to mice,” and even “of Turks to turkeys.”...MUCH MORE
While the writings of Darwin and Ekman never go as far as justifying physiognomy, the idea that the face can give our hidden thoughts away is an old idea that has taken many forms through history. It continues to persist today.By 1964, Ekman was struggling. He couldn’t study emotional behaviors without defining them precisely first, but nobody had yet been able to do that. This was when psychological theorist Silvan Tomkins, who would go on to become one of Ekman’s closest collaborators, introduced him to Darwin’s Expression. Ekman found Tomkins’ theoretical arguments in favor of innate human emotions to be more persuasive than Margaret Mead’s arguments in favor of culturally relative ones. He became convinced that, if he was going to test his hypothesis, he needed to first figure out a way to accurately quantify minute human facial expressions. Then he could see if there was a link between those facial expressions and inner, universal emotions....
