Ekman And Friesen 1971 Study

[Vickiana Sconyers]

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It's all in the face, or so the argument goes. Beginning with Charles Darwin's work described in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and backed up by hundreds of published scientific papers since. We know that non-verbal communication plays a central role in communication and emotion. Even current brain research supports this idea (see LeDoux, 1995).

Paul Ekman has had a distinguished career in psychological research and focused his work on the study of emotions and, in particular, their relation to facial expressions. He is probably best known for his work in the late 1960s when, along with colleague Wallace Friesen, he studied the Fore people of Papua New Guinea (PNG) to test the Darwinian hypothesis, that a particular set of emotions and how they are expressed are both innate and universal (Darwin, 1872).

In 1967 and 1968, Ekman travelled to PNG to study nonverbal behaviour of the Fore people, an isolated, subsistence-oriented cultural group. The research was funded by a grant from the US Department of Defense. The study aimed to test Darwin's claim that facial expressions are universal and not as many Anthropologists had claimed, culturally specific and determined (Mead, 1975).

However, where can you find anyone who has not been exposed to television, movies and other forms of popular media? In PNG, such a group of people existed. The people of the Fore cultural group of the South East Highlands of PNG were very isolated with only minimal contact with other peoples until the 1950s. They lived in a Neolithic culture, and many had no contact at all with outsiders.

Ekman and Friesen choose 189 Fore adults and 130 Fore children to be part of their study group. They were selected on strict criteria of minimal contact with Westerners and any form of mass-media (Ekman & Friesen, 1971:125). Twenty-three Fore, who had had extensive contact with Westerners, who had seen movies and spoke English, were chosen as a control group.

The results were that both adults and children were able to associate the same emotion concepts with the same facial behaviours as did members of Western and Eastern literate cultures (p. 128). The researchers found no differences between genders and the results for the Fore who had been Westernised was almost the same as the experimental group. Ekman and Friesen reported they had found empirical support for the universality of certain emotions.

The expressions he found to be universal were those indicating anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Other researchers have since confirmed the universality of these six emotions. Ekman & Keltner (2014) state that almost 200 scientific studies have shown that people from entirely different cultures can label facial expressions with terms from a list of emotion words.

Critics, such as Professor James Russell (1994), have questioned the methodology and internal validity of the Ekman & Friesen study. Russell has argued that the faults in the design of the Fore experiments, make the conclusions of these studies impossible to interpret. Others have also questioned the universality thesis and suggested that facial expressions are socially learned and differ across cultures.

The work of Ekman and his colleagues supports the idea that certain emotions are common to all national cultures and that we can identify these in others. Ekman suggested there were at least six basic emotions; anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. There is also support for a seventh emotion, contempt (Matsumoto, 1992). In 1999 Ekman, also introduced 15 other emotions that are distinguishable from each other.

In 2014, three Neuroscientists from the University of Glasgow, published their work on the biology of human emotions and questioned the thesis of six basic emotions and suggested that there were only four. These were happy, sad, fear/surprise and disgust/anger (Jack, Garrod & Schyns, and 2014:192). This research suggests that our emotional signals evolve with possibly only four basic emotions being biologically based and later developing socially into the six or seven facial expressions of emotion.

While Ekman's and his colleague's work has shown us the possible universality of emotion, we should not read into this a lack of cultural difference in emotion. For example, research has demonstrated cross-cultural gender differences in how emotions are experienced. A meta-analysis of 162 studies showed that gender differences in smiling are culture and age-specific (LaFrance, Hecht & Paluck, 2003).

Although nonverbal communication often provides valuable information about people's emotions, we need to be careful, not to take Ekman's work and apply it simplistically. There may be six or seven emotions that are universal, but this does not mean that it is easy to decode non-verbal gestures. For example, when a person's facial expression shows anger, but he or she is in a frightening situation, we may incorrectly interpret the emotion as fear.

Ekman states that his research has shown how people can misrepresent emotions. He states that while good liars can mimic facial expressions to support their lies, sometimes there is what Ekman calls leakage in the facial and vocal expressions of the liars (Ekman, 1993). However, most people are not able to detect lies, though some people can read lies better than others (Ekman, 1988).

Some people seem able to read the subtle 'micro-expressions' that can betray a lie. After retiring from his University in 2004, Ekman opened a private company dedicated to "enhancing emotional awareness" and offering several on-line tools for developing skills in detecting micro-expressions.

He looks like someone I can trust, and intelligent too. Must be about 50 years old, and I bet his family came from Norway. You can tell he's had a lot of laughs in his life, but right now he seems to be a little blue. He's a handsome fellow, and just look, he seems to be sexually interested in that woman.

Judgments like these are often made on the basis of facial appearance. Some of them may be accurate, correctly identifying something about the person. For example, gender is often accurately identified from facial appearance; accurate information may also be gleaned about a person's age, but there is more room for error. Some judgments may be based on stereotypes, with no grounding in fact. Some people may believe, for example, that a relatively large forehead indicates intelligence, or that crowsfeet wrinkles are evidence of a happy life. Some judgments may be quite idiosyncratic. There may be no shared beliefs, let alone accuracy. For example, the wrinkle that one person interprets as a sign of wisdom may be interpreted by another as a sign of dissolution.

The third set of facial signs are the rapid changes, which can occur in a matter of seconds. Some of the rapid signs may be more visible than others. For example, some changes in muscle tonus may be quite subtle or not visible at all. Even if not visible, muscle tonus changes could provide information to another person through touch, or could provide information to the person himself through proprioceptive or cutaneous feedback. Temperature changes may be primarily a self-informative sign, although they are also available to others through touch.

The fourth set of facial signs are artificial in the sense that they interfere with the static and slow sign vehicles. Apart from optical glasses used to improve vision, most of the artificial signs attempt to enhance beauty or combat signs of age, which, as we will discuss later, is often the same thing.

This listing of facial sign vehicles is not proposed as final or comprehensive, but it is useful for what we will discuss. If, for example, we were to discuss in any detail the facial signs of disease, the list of facial sign vehicles would have to be considerably elaborated.

We distinguish one person from another by their faces. It is probably the primary way we distinguish and remember each unique member of our species. This is not to suggest that there are not other signs of identity, e.g., fingerprints, or even identity signs requiring no special aids to perception, such as voice characteristics, posture, gait, etc. There is even research suggesting infants can identify particular persons from olfactory cues (Russell, 1976). I suggest that the face is the main, most commonly employed visual identity sign.2

People differ in their ability to remember faces and recall whether or not they have seen a particular face before. Memory for faces is the result of the interplay among the sex and race of the perceiver and the sex and race of the person perceived (cf. Cross, Cross, and Daly, 1971; Chance, Goldstein, and McBride, 1975; Malpass and Kravitz, 1969). A number of studies have examined the basis for the influence of race (in perceiver or perceived) in memory for faces. The amount of exposure to members of another race, one's social attitudes toward members of another race, and personality variables all seem to be relevant when the races of the perceiver and the perceived differ (cf. Galper, 1973; Lavrakas, Buri, and Mayzner, 1975; in addition to references cited above). Apart from race, faces rated as unique (Going and Read, 1974) or beautiful (Cross, Cross, and Daly, 1971) by one group of subjects tend to be better remembered by other comparable groups of subjects. Cognitive style, in particular measures of field independence-dependence, has been found to be related to memory for faces, but the results have not been consistent (Messick and Damarin, 1964; Lavrakas, Buri, and Mayzner, 1975). A more robust and consistent finding has been that people who are right-hemisphere dominant, or those having a left-rather than a right-hemispheric lesion, are better able to remember faces (see Levy, Trevarthen, and Sperry, 1972; Rizzolatti, Umilta, and Berlucchi, 1971; Yin, 1970). It is not certain, however, whether these findings are specific to memory of human faces or general to a type of information processing.

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