Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Paul Ekman put Darwin’s universality thesis to a simple empirical test: The original report of Ekman’s study is found in the following: Ekman, E.R. Sorenson, and Wallace V. Friesen, “Pan-Cultural Elements in the Facial Displays of Emotions,” Science 164 (1969): 86–88. The critiques of this study are best summarized in James Russell’s assessments of the data on the universality of emotion recognition in the face: J. A. Russell, “Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression? A Review of Methods and Studies,” Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994): 102–41. This critique focuses on several questions. The most important is whether people in different cultures would label Ekman’s faces in similar fashion if allowed to use their own words, rather than using the words or scenarios provided by an experimenter. The answer is yes. See J. Haidt and D. Keltner, “Culture and Facial Expression: Open Ended Methods Find More Faces and a Gradient of Universality,” Cognition and Emotion 13 (1999): 225–66.

The data gathered in this study would pit two radically different conceptions of emotion against one another: For an excellent summary of social constructionist accounts of emotion, see Keith Oatley, “Social Construction in Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 342–52.

An evolutionary approach took shape as Ekman started to publish the findings from this first study: For an early evolutionary account of the emotions, see John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Past Explains the Present: Emotional Adaptations and the Structure of Ancestral Environments,” Ethology and Sociobiology 11 (1990): 375–424. R. M. Neese, “Evolutionary Explanations of Emotions,” Human Nature 1 (1990): 261–83. For a more recent summary of such thinking, see D. Keltner, J. Haidt, and M. N. Shiota, “Social Functionalism and the Evolution of Emotions,” in Evolution and Social Psychology, ed. Mark Schaller, Jeffrey A. Simpson, and Douglas T. Kenrick (New York: Psychology Press, 2006), 115–42.

Emotions at their core are concepts, words, and ideas that shape, and are shaped by, discourse practices such as storytelling, poetry, public shaming, or gossip: Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has done brilliant work on how emotions are embedded in social discourse and constructed in those social practices. In her work on Bedouin culture, she documents how emotions like embarrassment and modesty are constructed in patterns of dress, poetry, and gossip. Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz, Introduction to Language and the Politics of Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

The Inuit were never observed to express anger: J. L. Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

In the critical study: Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen, “Pan-Cultural Elements.”

Perhaps the chorus of critiques arose because Ekman’s data may have been reminiscent of the claims of Social Darwinism: For an enlightening history of Social Darwinism, read Stanford historian Carl Degler’s work. Degler, In Search of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Such was the aim of Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer: Schachter and Singer, “Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State,” Psychological Review 69 (1962): 379–99.

E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems, 1913/1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980).

On this, Linda Levine and George Bonanno have found in their research that when people report upon past experiences: L. Levine, “Reconstructing Memory for Emotions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 126 (1997): 165–77. M. A. Safer, G. A. Bonanno, and N.P. Field, “It Was Never That Bad: Biased Recall of Grief and Long-Term Adjustment to the Death of a Spouse,” Memory 9 (2001): 195–204.

To capture the objective subjective, Ekman and Wallace Friesen devoted seven years, without funding or promise of publication, to developing the Facial Action Coding System: For a full description of the system, see Ekman and Friesen, Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1978). For a compilation of dozens of studies that have fruitfully applied the Facial Action Coding System to the scientific study of emotion, see Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg, What the Face Reveals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).