Fear, Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Surprise, and Disgust; these are the 6 basic emotions that supposedly transcend race, language, culture. First proposed by Dr. Paul Ekman, these 6 emotions are commonly believed to be recognizable to all humans through facial expressions. But new research suggests that we have found two too many. By studying the range of different muscles in the face and the time it takes for each muscle to activate, scientists have uncovered that two of these emotions may be merged. Happiness and sadness use distinctly different facial muscles, which are used within different time frames yet the same cannot be said for fear and surprise. Eyes wide open are the clue. These to emotions do not use distinctly different muscles and share many visual characteristics. Likewise, the wrinkled nose appears in both anger and disgust. Evolutionarily this merging makes sense. Fear and surprise require many of the same responses; open eyes widen the field of vision easing possible escape. A wrinkled nose protects against inspiration of toxic particles, a response required of both anger and disgust.
I find this approach to emotion interesting, because it focuses on the temporal dynamics of facial muscles instead of the psychology behind emotion. If trying to categorize emotions while focused on psychology, it seems that an infinite number of emotions can be found and these categorizations vary between cultures. This new approach is more concrete, but I doubt it has much of a practical application to psychology, due to it's extreme simplification.
This is really cool to read about! I know that physically they may differ, but I would be interested to see what they observe from a chemical standpoint. It's weird to think that something we categorize as so different could actually be really similar.
ReplyDeleteThese studies always amaze me. I would love to be one of those scientists who studies things like that and how the brain activates the emotions that we see through facial expressions. So cool!
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