Was Darwin Wrong About Emotional Expressions?

@article{Barrett2011WasDW,
  title={Was Darwin Wrong About Emotional Expressions?},
  author={Lisa Feldman Barrett},
  journal={Current Directions in Psychological Science},
  year={2011},
  volume={20},
  pages={400 - 406}
}
  • L. F. Barrett
  • Published 1 December 2011
  • Art
  • Current Directions in Psychological Science
Emotional expressions have endured as a topic of profound scientific interest for over a century, in part due to Darwin’s classic volume, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Since its publication, there has been a strong, spirited debate over the origin, nature, and function of emotional expressions. In this article, I consider two basic questions: What did Darwin really write about emotional expressions, and how well does his account match the modern, conventional, “basic emotion… 
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Citation Type

What Are Emotion Expressions For?
Although research on the nonverbal expression of emotion has played a prominent role throughout psychology during the past two decades—including an instrumental role in the development of…
Emotion Expressions
TLDR
Why the two alternative explanations Barrett offers for the origins of emotion expressions—expressions as cultural symbols and/or as evolutionary byproducts—are both untenable in light of existing research are discussed.
Two Concepts of Emotional Expression
“Emotional expression” is an unfortunately ambiguous term. Scientists define it in two distinct ways, and this difference in definition leads them to employ the term inconsistently. In some…
The hundred-year emotion war: are emotions natural kinds or psychological constructions? Comment on Lench, Flores, and Bench (2011).
TLDR
It is pointed out that Lench et al.'s findings do not support their claim that discrete emotions organize cognition, judgment, experience, and physiology because they did not demonstrate emotion-consistent and emotion-specific directional changes in these measurement domains.
Emotions are real.
TLDR
It is proposed that physical changes in the face, voice, and body, or neural circuits for behavioral adaptations like freezing, fleeing, or fighting, transform into an emotion when those changes take on psychological functions that they cannot perform by their physical nature alone.
Expressions as signs and their significance for emotional development.
TLDR
Three stages of emotional development supported by empirical evidence on how a biologically given set of neonate emotions are transformed into a culturally modified set of conscious, sign-mediated emotions that enables a decoupling of expression and feeling are described.
Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements
TLDR
There is an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another.
Emotion, imagination and the world’s furniture
Abstract I scrutinize a view of emotion that was established in the late nineteenth century and bequeathed to subsequent generations of psychological researchers. That view has strong evolutionary…
Darwin’s antithesis revisited – a zoosemiotic perspective on expressing emotions in animals and animal cartoon characters
In the animation and design of cartoon characters, animators have often turned to the study of biological theories and observation of human actors and animals to capture lifelike movements and…
Mapping discrete and dimensional emotions onto the brain: controversies and consensus
  • S. Hamann
  • Psychology
    Trends in Cognitive Sciences
  • 2012
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References

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Although research on the nonverbal expression of emotion has played a prominent role throughout psychology during the past two decades—including an instrumental role in the development of…
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