This week's #curatedasset is here! ⬇️ A Brief Intellectual History of the Universality of Emotional Expressions Author: Paul Eckman Blog Topics: emotional expression, history of psychology, cognitive science Read time: 5-10 minutes. This pieces delves into the history of emotional expression, and how it has been studied and viewed over the past two centuries. The piece references Darwin’s lesser known book "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals" and links it to modern day research techniques which investigate Darwin’s original questions around the extent do animals feel and express emotions, and the similarities between human, and nonhuman emotions and expressions. We learn that the technique pioneered by Dr Eckman ( facial action coding system) has now been adapted for animals, allowing for direct comparison between human and nonhuman emotion expressions and a deeper dive into the ideas originally posed by Darwin. The blog then gives a brief overview of the different schools of thought regarding emotions, and what dictates their expression in humans over the past 2 centuries. This is done to illustrate why Darwin’s original ideas surrounding potential similarities between human and non-human emotions were originally ignored. We see a shift from behaviorism, which prevailed in the late 1800’s to Watson’s relativism in the early 1900’s to today’s current intellectual climate in which most scientists accept that both nature and nurture play a part in how humans develop and express emotions.

Posted by Emotion at Work Team at 2023-04-28 10:19:57 UTC