Facial expressions—including fear—may not be as universal as we though

Facial Expressions

- including fear—may not be as universal as we thought -

Lesson Standards

10.5(C)

10.1(A)

10.5(D)

10.2(A)

10.5(G)

10.2(B)

10.8(A)

10.2(C)

10.9(C)

10.3

10.4(E)

10.4(F)

10.4(G)

What will our learning look like today?

Success Criteria

Learning Intention

Language Objective

Learning Objective

• Identify and describe different cultural interpretations of facial expressions.
• Discuss the factors that influence the interpretation of facial expressions.

Today, we will explore the concept of text structure and organizational design and learn how it influences the meaning of a text.

I will use academic vocabulary to discuss and analyze facial expressions and cultural variations.

After an initial reading and discussion of the informational text, students will be able to identify and restate the text’s key ideas and details.

Do Now:

Look at each of these pictures and write in the chat which emotion you think is beng shown.

Intro

Michael Price is a science writer based in San Diego, California. He frequently writes about animals, genetics, technology, and the history of science. In this piece, he explores whether facial expressions are “universal”—that is, whether people all over the world use the same expressions to express the same emotions. *Watch StudySync Video

Context

• The Trobriands—also known as the Kiriwina Islands—are a series of 28 low-lying coral atolls in the South Pacific off the coast of New Guinea. Part of the nation of Papua New Guinea, the islands remain one of the most isolated and culturally distinct places on Earth.
• Trobrianders live in villages averaging 200 to 500 people and have a matrilineal system in which members of each family take their names from their mothers. Members of the mother’s bloodline are said to have the “same blood” and the same rights to land.
• For Trobrianders, yams are a symbol of prestige. Yams are harvested and displayed for others to admire. The islanders also grow other vegetables as well as raise pigs and go fishing for sustenance.
• Magic is an integral part of life in the Trobriand Islands. Villagers consult with magicians about their gardens, and magicians attempt to bring rain using incantations.

Are there universal expressions of emotion?

Vocabulary

methodology

implication

the procedures followed in a particular discipline

the possible effect, result or consequence of an action or decision

minimal

prominently

in a strong or noticeable way

the least possible

Vocabulary

pancultural

tenets

Across all cultures

a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy

horticulturists

an expert in garden cultivation and management.

Summary

Michael Price contends that while certain facial expressions, like fear and happiness, may read the same in the West, in Papua New Guinea they may have a different connotation. These findings contradict past studies and may have consequences for future technologies, such as facial recognition software and artificial intelligence programs. While previous studies showed that emotions were universally understood, recent studies have begun to question these results. One psychologist used the same methodology with the people of the Trobriand islands off Papua New Guinea and achieved different results. This suggests that the meanings of facial expressions vary among different cultures and, instead of being universal, are dependent on their culture. However, some disagree, believing that people will want to hold onto the idea of universality in emotions because it reinforces a common humanity.

When you’re smiling, it may feel like the whole world is smiling with you, but a new study suggests that some facial expressions may not be so universal. In fact, several expressions commonly understood in the West—including one for fear—have very different meanings to one indigenous, isolated society in Papua New Guinea. The new findings call into question some widely held tenets of emotional theory, and they may undercut emerging technologies, like robots and artificial intelligence programs tasked with reading people’s emotions. For more than a century, scientists have wondered whether all humans experience the same basic range of emotions—and if they do, whether they express them in the same way. In the 1870s, it was the central question Charles Darwin explored in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. By the 1960s, emeritus psychologist Paul Ekman, then at the University of California (UC) in San Francisco, had come up with an accepted methodology to explore this question. He showed pictures of Westerners with different facial expressions to people living in isolated cultures, including in Papua New Guinea, and then asked them what emotion was being conveyed. Ekman’s early experiments appeared conclusive. From anger to happiness to sadness to surprise, facial expressions seemed to be universally understood around the world, a biologically innate response to emotion. That conclusion went virtually unchallenged for 50 years, and it still features prominently in many psychology and anthropology textbooks, says James Russell, a psychologist at Boston College and corresponding author of the recent study. But over the last few decades, scientists have begun questioning the methodologies and assumptions of the earlier studies. Psychologist Carlos Crivelli was one of them. In 2011, he was working with his colleague, psychologist José-Miguel Fernández-Dols, at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Together, they came up with a plan to investigate Elkman's

initial research in Papua New Guinea. Crivelli and longtime friend and research partner, Sergio Jarillo, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, traveled to the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea’s east coast, where about 60,000 indigenous Trobrianders live. These horticulturists and fishermen have been historically isolated from both mainland Papua New Guinea and the outside world. To learn all that they could, Crivelli and Jarillo embedded themselves in the local culture. They were adopted by host families and took clan names; Crivelli became “Kelakasi” and Jarillo, “Tonogwa.” They spent many months learning the local language, Kilivila. When it came time to begin the study, they didn’t need translators or local guides. They simply showed 72 young people between the ages of 9 and 15 from different villages photos from an established set of faces used in psychological research. The researchers asked half the Trobrianders to link each of the faces to an emotion from a list: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, or hunger. The other half was given a different task. Crivelli found that they matched smiling with happiness almost every time. Results for the other combinations were mixed, though. For example, the Trobrianders just couldn’t widely agree on which emotion a scowling face corresponded with. Some said this and some said that. It was the same with the nose-scrunching, pouting, and a neutral expression. There was one facial expression, though, that many of them did agree on: a wide-eyed, lips-parted gasping face (similar to above) that Western cultures almost universally associate with fear and submission. The Trobrianders said it looked “angry.” Surprised, Crivelli showed a different set of Trobrianders the same faces, but he couched his questions in stories—e.g., “Which of these people would like to start a fight?”—to draw out more context. They, too, associated the gasp face with threatening behavior, Crivelli reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The

implications here are really big,” he says. “It strongly suggests that at least these facial behaviors are not pancultural, but are instead culturally specific.” That’s not to say that emotions don’t elicit natural physiological reactions, Russell explains, but the study suggests that reactions and interpretations can vary from culture to culture. With the gasp face, for example, Russell speculates that the expression could be a natural response to urgent, distressing situations. Whereas Western culture has tied that expression to feeling fear, it might be that the Trobrianders associate the expression with instilling it. Crivelli agrees, and points to another culture whose ritualized dances feature a similar expression in a threatening fashion: the Māori of New Zealand. Based on his research, Russell champions an idea he calls “minimal universality.” In it, the finite number of ways that facial muscles can move creates a basic template of expressions that are then filtered through culture to gain meaning. If this is indeed the case, such cultural diversity in facial expressions will prove challenging to emerging technologies that aspire to decode and react to human emotion, he says, such as emotion recognition software being designed to recognize when people are lying or plotting violence. “This is novel work and an interesting challenge to a tenet of the so-called universality thesis,” wrote Disa Sauter, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, in an email. She adds that she’d like to see the research replicated with adult participants, as well as with experiments that ask people to produce a threatening or angry face, not just interpret photos of expressions. “It will be crucial to test whether this pattern of ‘fear’ expressions being associated with anger/threat is found in the production of facial expressions, since the universality thesis is primarily focused on production rather than perception.”

Social psychologist Alan Fridlund at UC in Santa Barbara, says the researchers’ level of immersion in the Trobrianders’ culture gives them a unique perspective on threat displays, and not relying on translators improves the study’s accuracy. “I think the real strength of this paper is that it knows its participants so well,” he says. But he adds that the snapshot method may not be the best way to analyze how people view different facial expressions—after all, in everyday life, people see facial expressions in the context of what’s going on around them, he says. Another problem has to do with the study design—“happiness” was the only positive emotion that Trobrianders were given as an option, Fridlund says, which may have biased the results. For example, if the researchers had included “amusement” or “contentment” as answers, the apparent agreement over smiling might have disappeared. Despite agreeing broadly with the study’s conclusions, Fridlund doubts it will sway hardliners convinced that emotions bubble forth from a common fount. Ekman’s school of thought, for example, arose in the post–World War II era when people were seeking ideas that reinforced our common humanity, Fridlund says. “I think it will not change people’s minds. People have very deep reasons for adhering to either universality or cultural diversity.”

¡Thank you!