A radical new theory proposes that facial expressions are not emotional displays, but “tools for social influence”

Expressing sadness or seeking protection? By Emma Young You’re at a ten-pin bowling alley with some friends, you bowl your first ball – and it’s a strike. Do you instantly grin with delight? Not according to a study of bowlers, who smiled not at a moment of triumph but rather when they pivoted in their lanes, to look at their fellow bowlers.  That study provided the earliest evidence for a controversial hypothesis, the Behavioural Ecology View (BECV) of facial displays, outlined in detail in a new opinion piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Carlos Crivelli at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK and Alan Fridlund at the University of California, Santa Barbara, put forward the case that facial displays are not universal, “pre-wired” expressions of emotion – a concept supported by 80 per cent of emotion researchers in a recent poll – but are flexible tools for influencing the behaviour of other people.  The same range of specific facial displays have been associated with anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise in many different cultures. As Paul Ekman at the University of California, San Francisco – the best-known proponent of the “basic emotions theory” or BET – writes in a blog post: “The capacity for humans in radically different cultures to label facial expressions with terms from a list of emotion terms has replicated nearly 200 hundred times.” However, Crivelli and Fridlund write in their paper: “Despite its popul...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Faces Social Source Type: blogs