![]() The process itself allowed for a kind of massive stockpiling-pictures compared to one another, minutiae contrasted, hypotheses often mistakenly corroborated-which, while arguably rooted in scientific inquiry, led to a stunning degree of generalization in the name of fact. Unlike the interpretive transference of a drawing, or the abstract data of a diagram, the camera was clear and direct, a vehicle for proof. The idea that photography allowed for the demonstration and distribution of objective visual evidence was a striking development for clinicians. The real seduction, in Darwin’s era and in our own, lies in the notion that pictures-and especially pictures of our faces-are remarkably powerful tools of persuasion and do, in so many instances, speak louder than words. But what happens to such comparative practices when supposition trumps proposition, when the science of scrutiny is eclipsed by the lure of a bigger, messier, more global extrapolation? When does the quest for the universal backfire-and become a discriminatory practice? As a methodology for parsing facial expression, Ekman’s work provides a practical rubric for understanding these distinctions: It’s logical, codified, and clear. 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. In so doing, comparisons can-and do-glide effortlessly from hypothesis to hyperbole, particularly when images are in play.Īlmost 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. At the same time, certain specimens, when classified by visual genre, become the easy targets of discrimination. We are, after all, genetically predisposed to share traits with those in our familial line, occasionally by virtue of our geographic vicinity. Empirically, the idea itself is not unreasonable. 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. 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. (“No determined man,” he writes in “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” “probably ever had an habitually gaping mouth.”) This urge to label “types”-a loaded and unfortunate term-would essentially go viral in the early years of the coming century, with such assumptions reasserting themselves as dogmatic, even axiomatic, fact. ![]() In spite of his influence on evolutionary biology and his role in the scientific study of emotion, Darwin’s prognostications read today as remarkably prejudicial. While Darwin’s scientific contributions remain ever significant, it’s worth remembering he was also a man of his era-privileged, white, affluent, commanding-who generalized as much as, if not more than, he analyzed, especially when it came to objectifying people’s looks. But what really interested him was not so much the specificity of the individual as the universality of the tribe: If expressions could, as de Boulogne had suggested, be physically localized, could they also be culturally generalized?Īs a man of science, he set out to analyze the visual difference between types, which is to say races. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne’s produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually document the expressive spectrum of the face.Ĭombining speculation about raised eyebrows and flushed skin with vile commentary about mental illness, he famously logged diagrams of facial musculature, along with drawings of sulky chimpanzees and photographs of weeping infants, to create a study that spanned species, temperament, age, and gender. In 1872, with the publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin went rogue.
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