Ever wonder why we raise our eyebrows in surprise? Do you want to know
why people smile when they meet a stranger or the reason why teenage girls
scrunch up their noses in disgust at their parent’s rules? Why do we have
common facial expressions for emotions?
Here is a new research study that explains the origin of facial
expressions.
What
Are Emotion Expressions For?
ScienceDaily (Jan. 3,
2012) — That cartoon scary
face -- wide eyes, ready to run -- may have helped our primate ancestors
survive in a dangerous wild, according to the authors of an article published
in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the
Association for Psychological Science. The authors present a way that fear and
other facial expressions might have evolved and then come to signal a person's
feelings to the people around him.
The basic idea,
according to Azim F. Shariff of the University of Oregon, is that the specific
facial expressions associated with each particular emotion evolved for some
reason. Shariff cowrote the paper with Jessica L. Tracy of the University of
British Columbia. So fear helps respond to threat, and the squinched-up nose
and mouth of disgust make it harder for you to inhale anything poisonous
drifting on the breeze. The outthrust chest of pride increases both
testosterone production and lung capacity so you're ready to take on anyone.
Then, as social living became more important to the evolutionary success of
certain species -- most notably humans -- the expressions evolved to serve a social
role as well; so a happy face, for example, communicates a lack of threat and
an ashamed face communicates your desire to appease.
The research is based in
part on work from the last several decades showing that some emotional
expressions are universal -- even in remote areas with no exposure to Western
media, people know what a scared face and a sad face look like, Shariff says.
This type of evidence makes it unlikely that expressions were social
constructs, invented in Western Europe, which then spread to the rest of the
world.
And it's not just across
cultures, but across species. "We seem to share a number of similar
expressions, including pride, with chimpanzees and other apes," Shariff
says. This suggests that the expressions appeared first in a common ancestor.
The theory that
emotional facial expressions evolved as a physiological part of the response to
a particular situation has been somewhat controversial in psychology; another
article in the same issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science argues
that the evidence on how emotions evolved is not conclusive.
Shariff and Tracy agree
that more research is needed to support some of their claims, but that, "A
lot of what we're proposing here would not be all that controversial to other
biologists," Shariff says. "The specific concepts of 'exaptation' and
'ritualization' that we discuss are quite common when discussing the evolution
of non-human animals." For example, some male birds bring a tiny morsel of
food to a female bird as part of an elaborate courtship display. In that case,
something that might once have been biologically relevant -- sharing food with
another bird -- has evolved over time into a signal of his excellence as a
potential mate. In the same way, Shariff says, facial expressions that started
as part of the body's response to a situation may have evolved into a social
signal.
Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
