Editors: Jose-Miguel Fernandez-Dols, and James A. Russell
Publisher: Oxford University Press – 540 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram
The importance of correctly understanding facial expressions has grown increasingly in recent decades, with hundreds of terrorist attacks and thousands of people killed since the World Trade Center bombing on September 11, 2001 in which around 3,000 lives perished.
While there is a lot of literature out there on body language, not much is available that specializes on just facial expressions and their various meanings. This book fills that gap.
The first question that probably pops up in your mind is: “Is facial expression a science?” And: “Does it follow the rules of the scientific method?”
The best way to answer these questions is to simply quote the editors – Jose Miguel Fernandez-Dols and James A Russell – at the beginning of their Introduction:
“Much like the man on the street, practitioners in these specialties evidence a monolithic simplicity in their assumptions about faces, as if questions and answers in this field were sealed by Darwin’s time almost 150 years ago. These specialties and folk understanding may seem to be grounded in scientific research, but the fact is that the relationship between scientific approaches and practical specialties is often problematic or, in a significant number of cases, nonexistent. Perhaps more surprising is that many scientific research projects and claims are based on the same set of folk ideas.”
In 1997, Dols and Russell, in their book The Psychology of Facial Expression surveyed the available psychological research on facial expressions, and state that much of that “was at odds with the assumptions of Darwin, the practical specialties, and folk beliefs.”
Since then, studies of facial expression have grown in quantity and quality, and one of the purposes of this book is to provide an updated review of that literature on facial expression psychology, including research conducted by anthropologists, biologists, linguists, and social scientists.
Fifty-five specialists, including the two editors, in various fields within and beyond psychology and psychiatry – affective sciences, applied social science, biomedical imaging, brain sciences, business, emotional intelligence, experimental psychology, human development, human ecology, neuro-genetics, neuroscience, and, believe it or not, soldier research – contributed to this extensive book on the meanings of different facial expressions.
The authors and coauthors of the 26 chapters of this book hail from the United States and six other countries: Austria, Croatia, Germany, Israel, Spain, and the United Kingdom, The chapters are organized around 11 Parts itemized below to give you an overview of the contents:
- Part I – Introduction
- Part II – The Great Debate: The Facial Expression Program
- Part III – Evolution
- Part IV – Unexplored Signals
- Part V – Neural Processes
- Part VI – Individual Development
- Part VII – Social Perception
- Part VIII – Appraisal
- Part IX – Concepts
- Part X – Social Interaction
- Part XI – Culture
This book is useful not only to practitioners and researchers, but also to anyone curious to learn about facial expressions. It has been written in a way that is accessible to all.
Knowledge and interpretation of facial expressions are not only important but have practical applications in businesses in the areas of computer software design, cosmetics, drama and theater, and emotional intelligence.
This book covers numerous important and interesting topics.
For example, in chapter 3 entitled Facial Expressions, the author Paul Ekman raises the question of whether facial expressions of emotion are universal or culture-specific. In it he presents and discusses different kinds of evidence that support universal expressions as well as culture-specific ones. He also presents challenges to the evidence presented for or against each view.
Ekman writes that the first written formal study of facial expressions was Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872. Darwin contended that facial expressions were universal, and the evidence he presented in support of his view was the answers he received to 16 questions he sent to Englishmen living or traveling in eight parts of the world: Africa, America, Australia, Borneo, China, India, Malaysia, and New Zealand,
Ekman writes: “Even by today’s standard, that is a very good, diverse, sample. The Englishmen wrote that they saw the same expressions of emotion in these foreign lands as they had known in England, leading Darwin to say: “ It follows, from the information thus acquired, that the same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity.”
This is a pioneering work on a relatively new field. Congratulations to its editors and authors for blazing a new trail.
