Charles Darwin, Expression, and the Harmful Legacy of Eugenics

This article is adapted from Jessica Helfand’s book “Face,” an elaborately illustrated A to Z of the face, from historical mugshots to Instagram posts. Hardly the first to postulate on the graphic evidence of the grimace, Darwin hoped to introduce a system by which facial expressions might be properly evaluated. He shared with many of his generation a predisposition toward history: simply put, the idea that certain facial traits might have a basis in evolution. Empirically, the idea itself is not unreasonable. We are, after all, genetically predisposed to share traits with those in our familial line, occasionally by virtue of our geographic vicinity. At the same time, certain specimens, when classified by visual genre, become the easy targets of discrimination. In so doing, comparisons can — and do — glide effortlessly from hypothesis to hyperbole, particularly when images are in play. Almost exactly a century after the arrival of Darwin’s volume, Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, published a study in which he determined that there were seven principal facial expressions deemed universal across all cultures: anger, contempt, fear, happiness, interest, sadness, and surprise. His Facial Action Coding System (FACS) supported many of Darwin’s earlier findings and remains, to date, the gold standard for identifying any movement the face can make. As a methodology for parsing facial expression, Ekman’s work p...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Psychology syndication Source Type: news