Darwin and Facial Expression

In Darwin and Facial Expression, Paul Ekman and a cast of other notable scholars and scientists, reconsider the central concepts and key sources of information in Darwin's work on emotional expression. First published in 1972 to celebrate the centennial of the publication of Darwin's, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, it is the first of three works edited by Dr. Ekman and others on the subject. This Malor edition contains new and updated references.


Darwin claimed that we cannot understand human emotional expression without understanding the emotional expressions of animals, as our emotional expressions are in large part determined by our evolution. Not only are there similarities in the appearance of some emotional expressions between man and certain other animals, but the principles which explain why a particular emotional expression occurs with a particular emotion also apply across species.


From the Introduction:


Darwin's era began at roughly the same time as that of child psychology. When he began his studies in the 1830s, the biological and what later became officially the psychological sciences shared a common tradition of scientific methodology. Darwin himself experienced no difficulty as a naturalist collecting data on plants and animals as well as on human beings. For Darwin and many of his scientific contemporaries, man's behavior was as much a part of the natural world as that of any object that could be observed. Early infant biographies that formed the starting nucleus of child psychology serve as ample evidence of this.
By the time Darwin's career was well under way, however, psychology more or less officially established itself as an independent scientific discipline, which meant for the most part a separation from philosophy. In doing so, however, psychology became identified as a Geisteswissenschaft — a term given to that group of sciences which dealt primarily with matters of mind. In contrast, biology and the other physical sciences were referred to as Naturwissenschaften because they dealt primarily with material entities, whether organic or inorganic. Thus the latent gap between psychology and biology, attributable to a long tradition of the mind-body problem that plagued many sciences, grew rapidly almost overnight. This became especially true when psychology began asserting itself as a laboratory discipline. The relevance of Darwin's efforts for the science of human behavior consequently had a very weak start.


Other contributors include Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoff and Lewis Petrinovich.