Universal emotional expression (updated 2014, 2016, 2026)

Anyone familiar with the television drama Lie to me, now in it’s third session on FOX/ Sky, will know something of the work of Paul Ekman, upon who’s research it is based. Ekman has given his support to the programme, but maintains a blog on the FOX website 

to point out where and when he sees fiction portrayed as fact. Lie to me draws mainly on Ekman’s work on micro facial expressions and their connection with deception - emotional expressions which show for up to one fifth of a second before a person can consciously try to disguise them. But it is Ekman’s work on facial expressions as a whole, and their role in expressing universal emotions (as well as individual variations) which concerns me here.

It may come as a surprise to some that there are universal emotions and that they are overwhelmingly displayed on the face, of everyone - supported to varying degrees by tone of voice, and some body movement.  It may be even more surprising to learn that Ekman and his colleagues mapped the human face (43 muscles, up to 10,000 possible expressions, about a third of which are expressed emotions) and demonstrated the way emotions are transmitted through interaction, including the universals, over 30 years ago! (FACs - Facial Action Coding System 1978) A heaven sent gift you might think for mental health professionals, but how many have ever been taught them? (The CD-Rom for micro-expressions alone has been learnt by many in just one hour). Indeed one might well think that such ignorance of science by psychiatry is positively negligent, yet as Ekman has explained, it even took the Department of Psychiatry which employed him 20 years to put his research on the medical curriculum! Such things only serve to fuel one’s contempt for the world of mental health. This was one of the issues he reflected upon in an hour-long interview for the University of California at Berkeley - available on You Tube via the UC channel

Another, was how during the process of mapping the face and identifying muscles, many hours were required in front of a hand mirror. A consequence of which was the disturbing realisation of just how easily the repeated making of an emotional facial expression can cue the persistence of that emotion, how it induced a change in mood, whether it be fear or sadness.

I stumbled upon Ekman’s work about 3 years ago quite by chance, no one ever directed me to it. I found the easiest way to digest it was through two books Unmasking The Face, and Emotions Revealed. Much of it was a shock, I simply hadn’t learnt unconsciously as a child what faces show - not unrelated I’ve come to realise, to the fact that I later spent 20 years as a client of mental health services. However, for a fast introduction, go to Ekman’s website.

Darwin said it first, of course! He identified six universal expressions of emotion and implied that it is in the act of making the expression, in response to another human, that the emotion is felt. Ekman set-out to prove it and in the process added contempt. At the outset of Ekman’s career the ‘blank slate’ or ‘culturally relative’ view of almost all human behaviour held sway. What Ekman has demonstrated is that what is personal, is specific to the context an individual finds themselves in, and is always a variation built upon the structure of universal emotional expression. What remains up for debate is the extent to which emotion can be said to be made in the moment that you physically feel the shape of your face change, how much felt emotion is cued by others, how much effective communication depends on correctly learning what you are feeling, being able to communicate it to others, and make a correct interpretation of what others are showing you. Put another way, the windows through which we can understand another’s mental distress, the extent to which we can be said to ‘have empathy’ (feel what others feel) are; the facial expressions of emotion, the tone of voice, plus some supporting cues found in the gestures which support them. But when it comes to meaning, to what a particular emotion refers to, then gestures display their principal role - and that is to support language. Nonetheless, the work of people like Paul Ekman demonstrates that non-verbal behaviour and so called ‘inter-personal skills’ should really be the spine of any training in mental health, upon which all else can be hung. The pre-occupation with non-action, with non-physical cognitive skills - is just so much talk.

The first time I tested myself for recognition of emotions I scored just four out of the seven universals, let alone anything else! How many other clients like me need a program of active learning. After the anger, it occurred to me that the lack of emotional expression amongst many in mental distress may not be so much about shutting down, blocking-out, hiding or lacking emotion but simply a failure at recognition of emotion! In fact I’m more than contemptuous of some services I’m disgusted.

However, in the last couple of years I’ve gone in search of genuine smiles that can provoke happiness and managed to find one expert amongst the mental health workers I know. Surprise, surprise, she is of lowly status, on low pay and relatively lacking in formalised training - but she has the skill of hitting you with rapid-fire full smiles, up to half a dozen times a minute. An hour and a half of that re-programmes me for weeks.

(Note 2016; There was only ever one way this post was ever going to end!)

I ought to have added some time ago that I am of course aware of other approaches to the subject! For a more relativistic and social construct approach see...

An evolutionary approach to mental health

What follows is a temporary, but necessary diversion into ‘grand theory’. Necessary, because any approach to mental health that isn’t compatible with a theory of human behaviour in general doesn’t stand a chance. (Those stuck in the insular world of psychiatry and clinical psychology please note). I’ve included references this time, just to give pause to those tempted to come down on me ‘like a ton of bricks’!

I have an evolving definition and explanation for what mental distress (disorder or illness, mild or severe) is. It shows itself as a misplaced fear of others. Personal relationships breakdown, followed by an inability to form and maintain new ones. The sufferer becomes progressively more emotionally and cognitively isolated (which may or may not involve physical isolation too).

Madness results from our failure to constantly update and modify the mental map of the world we have in our brain. If we do not ‘test’ our predictions, beliefs, dreams, thoughts, internal dialogue, fantasies, hypotheses, plans, ideas about how the world is, and what the people within it think and feel, our map becomes rapidly out of date. If we act with an out of date model of the world - we will look mad to others, and they will treat us as mad. If others don’t share a large part of our model of reality we are emotionally and cognitively isolated. Though none of us ‘see’ the world as it really is, we all rely on making a more or less accurate map; by sharing we come to have a more complete understanding than we could ever achieve alone. The ability to doubt and live with uncertainty, and hence know that we must constantly test our vision of the world - is sanity. To control and fix our view is the first step on the road to disaster. And of course the only way to maintain an unchanging outlook is to isolate oneself from any evidence that might contradict it. If we fail to observe (insufficient data) or misinterpret (wrong theory) then the map becomes more out of date. If our prediction disagrees with the experiment it is wrong. An unmodified and out of date model of the world is one where our thoughts and feelings are anchored in the past, hence our predictions of the future may be hopelessly wrong. Mental disorder is emotional and cognitive isolation to varying degrees.

Emotional reactions always come first, from what our five senses are telling us in the present moment, only afterwards do we attach thoughts. If we attach thoughts that come from the past, then we are operating with an out of date model of the world. So often we are not aware of what, in the present moment is ‘cueing’ our emotions and reproducing redundant thoughts. It is natural to be in a meditative state and to focus on the present moment. When the mind drifts away the discipline is to learn to let go, again and again. It is the opposite of taking control. It is about allowing decisions to make themselves, of not worrying about an unknowable future and refusing to get involved in hopes and expectations. The goal should be greater mental awareness of others, at the same time as being more physically relaxed. A full-time activity done with the eyes open. Meditation is not a set of skills that once acquired, can be called on at leisure; for one’s inability to operate in the world, based on the learning made in past relationships, will always return unless such skills are continuously practiced. Unwanted emotions and thoughts from the past will always ‘crash-in’ - meditation is a continuous process of letting go. The myth of self-control leads most to imagine that without it, mayhem and moral collapse will ensue. In practice, the need to manage others falls away and you become a better companion!

The best introduction to meditation I have come across, as a way of operating throughout the day, is to be found in Harrison (1994), and can be read along with his articles on how the core skills have been extracted from their religious context (Harrison 2005-). Sue Blackmore goes further, much further, by placed meditation techniques in the context of human cultural and biological evolution, and how we have evolved the very idea of a ‘self’ (Blackmore 2000:219-246). It’s possible to move towards a resolution of the contradictions of modern life, and the mental distress they give rise to, by developing both an evolutionary perspective and by being aware of the promise of social neuroscience (deCharms 2008, Goleman 2007, Ramachandran 2009). If you view daily life as evolution by natural selection, from minute to minute as well as on a timescale of the last 180,000 years (since we became homo sapiens with our full range of mental capabilities and capacities), see the biological and social as evolving in parallel and feeding back on each other (though at very different rates), then other kinds of questions and explanations suggest themselves (Oppenheimer 2004, Dawkins 1989, Blackmore 2000, Stevens & Price 2000, Nesse & Williams 1996, Nesse 2006).

We have lived out ninety-five per cent of our history as hunter-gathers, moving through and living from the environment. The last eight to ten thousand years, since we have sought to transform the environment (with the invention of agriculture, ideas of ownership and permanent settlement), has been an exceptional, perverse, untypical and abnormal period. Our point of reference for mental wellbeing should be the pre-agricultural world, where we evolved to be nomadic, as part of groups (‘bands’) of no more than about one hundred and thirty people, consisting of relatively close genetic relatives. You cannot ‘know’, as in feel an emotional attachment for, more than about that number of people.

Empathy (the ability to feel what others feel) and a ‘theory of mind’ (knowing how others think) derive from humans almost unique ability to imitate using the ‘mirror neurons’ of the brain, and give the capability to identify with, and be accepted by your group! (Blackmore 2000, Ramachandran 2000, 2003:97-131, 2006, 2007, 2009) If these abilities are blocked by life experience, then you become isolated from the people you are genetically most attached and attracted to. The last eight to ten thousand years has seen the construction of a world containing mental illness. And the culmination is the development of mental health workers, with the normal human capacities, who then try to empathise and share the ‘theory of mind’ of the unhealthy! This leads to the maintenance or reproduction of mental distress. Therapists should be leaders, mentors and role models to whom a client can apprentice themselves, and should not try to connect or catch the habits of the ill. As clients we must imitate the mentally healthy. Three out of four people don’t have a mental health problem during their life times.

And it’s not ‘faulty’ genes either, it is because we did our early learning with very close genetic relatives to whom we are automatically attached. Problems arise as a result of conflicts between the quality of our learning and our attachment to the person from whom we learnt. If you were separated from your close genetic relatives, your learning may well have been exceptional, but your life may become a search for those you are instinctively attached to. Equally you may search the world in vain for a ‘soul mate’, because it is so unlikely in modern society that you will ever meet that person, from the edge of your natural ‘group’, with whom you have a relatively close genetic attraction. It never was nature or nurture - but the ways in which your personal learning, your own cultural evolution, conflicted with the demands of your own biology. Your genes will determine to whom you are attached and attracted to, but it is with your learning that mental disorder is created and maintained.

References　
Blackmore, S (2000) The Meme Machine Oxford University: Oxford
Dawkins, R (1989) The Selfish Gene Oxford University: Oxford
deCharms, C (2008) Christopher deCharms looks inside the brain TED conference presentation Feb 2008

Goleman, D (2007) Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Arrow: London
Harrison, E (1994) Teach Yourself To Meditate Piatkus: London
Harrison, E (2005-) articles for Nova Magazine available at http://www.perthmeditationcentre.com.au/articles/index.htm [10.1.10]
Nesse, R.M (2006) response to the ‘2005 Edge Question’ in Brockman, J (ed.) What We Believe But Cannot Prove Pocket: London
Nesse, R.M and Williams, G.C (1996) Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Healing Phoenix: London
Oppenheimer, S (2004) Out Of Eden: The peopling of the world Robinson: London
Ramachandran, V. S (2000) MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind “the great leap forward” in human evolutionhttp://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html [19.7.08]
Ramachandran, V. S (2003) The Emerging Mind Profile/BBC: London
Ramachandran, V. S (2006) ‘Mirror Neurons And The Brain In The Vat’ response to the 2006 Edge Question at; http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran06_index.html [3.6.09]
Ramachandran, V. S (2007) Self Awareness: The Last Frontier http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/rama08/rama08_index.html [6.1.09]
Ramachandran, V. S (2009) The neurons that shape civilisation TED conference presentation.

Stephens, A and Price, J (2000) Evolutionary Psychiatry: A new beginning Routledge: London