The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
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human behaviour | |
Publisher | John Murray |
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Publication date | 1872 |
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is Charles Darwin's third major work of evolutionary theory, following On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Initially intended as a chapter in The Descent of Man, The Expression grew in length and was published separately in 1872. This book concerns the biological aspects of emotional behavior, and Darwin explores the animal origins of such human characteristics as smiling and frowning, the shrugging of shoulders, the lifting of the eyebrows in surprise, and the baring of teeth in an angry sneer. A German translation of The Expression appeared in 1872; Dutch and French versions followed in 1873 and 1874. Since its first publication, The Expression has never been out of print, but it has also been described as Darwin's "forgotten masterpiece"; psychologist Paul Ekman has argued that The Expression is the foundational text for modern scientific psychology.
Before Darwin, human emotional life had posed problems to the
Amongst the innovations with this book are Darwin's circulation of a
The book's development: biographical aspects
Background: In the weeks before Queen Victoria's
The critical importance of the M Notebook lies in its timing in relation to Darwin's conception of '
Mr Browne then read his paper on organization as connected with Life and Mind... that Mind, as far as one individual sense and consciousness is concerned, is material..., the deleted minutes, 27 March 1827.
Mental dispositions are determined by the size and constitution of the brain... and these are transmitted by hereditary descent.
— George Combe, (1828) The Constitution of Man, page 101.
To avoid stating how far I believe in Materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock – (and phrenologists state that brain alters)....
— Charles Darwin, (July 1838) The M Notebook
Development of the Text 1866–1872: Very little of Darwin's emotional turmoil surfaced in On the Origin of Species in 1859, although Chapter 7 contains a mildly expressed argument on instinctive behaviour.
Universal Nature of Expression: Darwin notes the universal nature of expressions in the book, writing: "the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements."
This connection of mental states to the neurological organization of
Darwin emphasises a shared human and animal
Darwin's Sources on Emotional Expression: Darwin had attended debates about emotional expression at the
In the composition of the book, Darwin drew on worldwide responses to his
Darwin considered other approaches to the study of emotions, including their depiction in the arts – discussed by the actor Henry Siddons in his Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1807) and by the anatomist Robert Knox in his Manual of Artistic Anatomy (1852) – but abandoned them as unreliable, although Shakespearean quotations are scattered through the text. It is notable also that Darwin does not include a discussion of deception in his psychology of emotional expression.
Structure
Darwin opens the book with three chapters on "the general principles of expression", introducing the rather Lamarckist phrase serviceable associated habits. With this phrase, Darwin seeks to describe the initially voluntary actions which come together to constitute the complex expressions of emotion. He then invokes a principle of antithesis, through which opposite states of mind induce directly opposing movements. Finally, he discusses a direct action of the nervous system, in which an overflow of emotion is widely discharged, producing more generalised emotional expression.
This is followed by a section (three more chapters) on modes of emotional expression peculiar to particular species, including man. He then moves on to the main argument with his characteristic approach of astonishingly widespread and detailed observations. Chapter 7 discusses "low spirits", including
Subsequent chapters include considerations of "reflection and meditation" (associated with "ill-temper", sulkiness and determination), Chapter 10 on hatred and anger, Chapter 11 on "disdain, contempt, disgust, guilt, pride, helplessness, patience and affirmation" and Chapter 12 on "surprise, astonishment, fear and horror". In his discussion of the emotion of disgust, Darwin notes its close links to the sense of smell, and conjectures an association with excretory products. In Chapter 13, Darwin discusses complex emotional states including self-attention, shame, shyness, modesty and blushing. Darwin describes blushing as "the most peculiar and most human of the expressions".
Darwin closes the book with Chapter 14 in which he recapitulates his main argument: he shows how human emotions link mental states with bodily movement, and are genetically determined, deriving from purposeful animal actions. He comments on the implications of the book: a single origin for the entire human species, with universal human expressions; and he stresses the social value of expression, citing the emotional communication between mother and child. This is thinking far ahead of its time, when not even the biochemical nature of heredity was known, to arrange complex phenotypes such as human ethology on genetic pillars.
Illustrations
This was one of the first books to be illustrated with photographs – with seven heliotype plates[26] – and the publisher John Murray warned that this "would poke a [terrible] hole in the profits".[27]
The published book assembled illustrations rather like a Victorian family album, with engravings of the Darwin family's domestic pets by the zoological illustrator
Darwin received dozens of photographs of psychiatric patients from James Crichton-Browne, but included in the book only one engraving (photoengraved by James Davis Cooper) based on these illustrations – sent on 6 June 1870 (along with Darwin's copy of Duchenne's Mécanisme) (Darwin Correspondence Project: Letter 7220). This was Figure 19, p. 296 – and showed a patient (Crichton-Browne reported) under the care of Dr James Gilchrist at the Southern Counties Asylum (of Scotland), the public wing of the Crichton Royal in Dumfries.
I have been making immense use almost every day of your manuscript – the book ought to be called by Darwin and Browne ?
— Charles Darwin to James Crichton Browne
Reception
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Contemporary
The review in the January 1873 Quarterly Journal of Science concluded that "although some parts are a little tedious, from the amount of minute detail required, there is throughout so much of acute observation and amusing anecdote as to render it perhaps more attractive to general readers than any of Mr. Darwin's previous work".[29]
Modern
Eric Korn, in the London Review of Books, describes how the book was claimed, and he argues subverted, by Margaret Mead and her "sympathisers", and then presented afresh by Paul Ekman. Ekman had collected pro-Darwin, anti-Mead evidence, Korn wrote, for the universality of human facial expression of emotions. Darwin, suggests Korn, avoided unsettling the Victorian public by arguing that humans had "animal traits", and instead charmed them by telling stories of "human traits in animals", thus avoiding too much explicit talk of natural selection at work. Darwin preferred to leave the evolutionary implications hanging. Korn points out that the book has never been out of print since 1872, calling into question Ekman's talk of "Darwin's lost masterpiece".[30]
The "Editor's notes" at the "Mead Project source page" on the book comment that
Darwin's book ... is among the most enduring contributions from 19th century psychology. The ideas expressed in its pages have persisted, for better or worse, down through the present, in one form or another. Although premised on an unsupportable interpretation of the nature of "expression," it is this idea that permeates the majority of work on emotional experience within psychology... Dewey's critique of Darwin's principles provides no small part of the foundations on which functionalist psychology is built. Similarly, the work plays a very large part in George Herbert Mead's discussion of the formation of significant symbols, as outlined in the early chapters of Mind, Self and Society. As Dewey notes, the arguments presented by Darwin may be wrong, but they are compelling.[31]
Publication
Darwin concluded work on the book with a sense of
The Expression was published by John Murray on 26 November 1872. It quickly sold around 7,000 copies and was widely praised as a charming and accessible introduction to Darwin's evolutionary theories.[33]
A revised edition was published by Darwin's son in 1890, without several revisions suggested by Darwin; these were not published until the 1999 edition (edited by Paul Ekman).[34]
Influence
Published as a sequel to The Descent of Man, The Expression was assured of a wide readership in mid-Victorian England. However, the early death of George Romanes (1848–1894) robbed Darwin of a powerful advocate in the field of comparative psychology and his impact on academic psychology was muted, partly because of Wilhelm Wundt's dimensional approach to the emotions and the widespread influence of the behaviorist school during the twentieth century.
The generous style of biological illustration
Darwin's ideas were followed up in
On 24 January 1895,
George Herbert was wrong when he said that man was all symmetry; it was woman to whom that remark applied....evolution is still going on, and the faces of men and women still altering, for the better, every day. The emotions are less violently expressed....our ancestors gave vent to their feelings in a way that we would be ashamed of, and their range of feeling seems to have been in some degree more limited. The language of the countenance, like that of the tongue, has been enriched in the process of the suns....
— James Crichton-Browne, On Emotional Expression, being The Presidential Address, Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society (Thursday, 24 January 1895)
All these sensations and innervations belong to the field of The Expression of the Emotions, which, as Darwin (1872) has taught us, consists of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose. These may now for the most part have become so much weakened that the expression of them in words seems to us to be only a figurative picture of them, whereas in all probability the description was once meant literally; and hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words....
— Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895)
See also
- Affect display
- Body language
- Book illustration
- Charles Darwin's health
- Emotion and memory
- Emotional intelligence
- Emotions in animals
- Evolution of emotion
- Facial expression
- Nonverbal communication
- Posture (psychology)
References
- ^ see, for example, Sartre, Jean-Paul (1971) Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (with a Preface by Mary Warnock) London: Methuen & Co., originally published (1939) as Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions.[ISBN missing][page needed]
- ^ Young, Robert M. (1970) Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted (1990) in History of Neuroscience Series New York: OUP[ISBN missing][page needed]
- ^ Darwin Charles, Ekman Paul, Prodger Phillip (1998) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd edn, London: Harper Collins.[ISBN missing][page needed]
- ^ Snyder, Peter J. et al (2010) Charles Darwin's Emotional Expression "Experiment" and His Contribution to Modern Neuropharmacology Journal of the History of Neurosciences, 19:2, pp. 158–70
- ^ a b Barrett 1980
- ^ Darwin, Charles (2002) Autobiographies, edited by Michael Neve and Sharon Messenger, and introduced by Michael Neve. London: Penguin Classics. In his Introduction (pp. ix–xxiii), Neve makes a detailed survey of this complex area of Darwin's psychological life.
- ^ Barrett 1980, p. xviii
- ^ Ospovat, Dov (1981) The Development of Darwin's Theory Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- ^ Mayr, Ernst (1991) One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the genesis of modern evolutionary thought Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press
- ^ Barrett 1980, pp. 6–37
- ^ Browne, E. Janet (1995) Charles Darwin: Voyaging, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 383–84.
- ^ Barrett 1980, p. xix
- ^ Pearn, Alison M. (2010) "This Excellent Observer..." : the Correspondence between Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne, 1869–75, History of Psychiatry, 21, 160–75
- ^ see, for example, Paul Ekman's textual commentary in Darwin, Ekman, Prodger (1998) The Expression of the Emotions, 3rd edition, London: HarperCollins, pp. 45, 54; and see also "Introduction" by Steven Pinker (2008) The Expression of the Emotions London: The Folio Society, pp. xix–xxii.
- ^ Desmond, Adrian (1982) Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850–1875 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 116–21
- ^ Desmond, Adrian (1989) The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London Chicago: University of Chicago Press
- ^ Stott, Rebecca (2003) Darwin and the Barnacle London: Faber and Faber
- ^ Boulter, Michael (2006) Darwin's Garden: Down House and the Origin of Species London: Constable
- ^ Bowlby, John (1990) Charles Darwin, A Biography London: Hutchinson.
- ^ Bell, Charles (1806) Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting London:
- ^ Bell, Charles (1824) Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression London: John Murray
- ^ Bowlby, pp. 6–14
- ^ Hartley, Lucy (2001) Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth Century Culture Cambridge University Press; see especially chapter 5: Universal expressions: Darwin and the naturalisation of expression, pp. 142 - 179.
- ^ Walmsley, Tom (1993) Psychiatry in descent: Darwin and the Brownes, Psychiatric Bulletin, 17, 748–51
- ^ Maudsley, Henry (1870) Body And Mind: The Gulstonian Lectures for 1870 London: Macmillan and Co.
- ISBN 978-0-19-972230-3. Retrieved 4 August 2013.
Heliotype was a new photomechanical method of reproduction invented by the photographer Ernest Edwards (1837–1903), for whom Darwin had sat for a portrait in 1868. Although he had no experience in photographic publishing, Darwin suggested this new technique to John Murray. ... heliotype reduced the cost of production considerably, enabling Darwin to afford the unprecedented number of photographs appearing in Expression.
- ISBN 978-0-19-977197-4. Retrieved 4 August 2013.
Darwin's English publisher, John Murray, was at first opposed to the idea of using photographs to illustrate the book. He advised Darwin that the inclusion of photographs would make Expression a money-losing proposition
- ^ Duchenne (de Boulogne), G.-B., (1990) The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression by Guillaume-Benjamin (Amand) Duchenne de Boulogne edited and translated by R. Andrew Cuthbertson, Cambridge University Press and Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de L'Homme, originally published (1862) Paris: Éditions Jules Renouard, Libraire
- ^ Anon (January 1873). "Darwin's 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals'". Quarterly Journal of Science: 113–18.
- ^ Korn, Eric (November 1998). "How far down the dusky bosom?". London Review of Books. 20 (23): 23–24.
- ^ c/o Ward, Lloyd Gordon (2007). "A Mead Project Source Page: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal". The Mead Project, Brock University, Ontario, Canada. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
- ISBN 978-0-521-43423-2.
To [Leonard Darwin] 29 July [1872] [Down] CD cannot improve style [of Expression] without great changes. 'I am sick of the subject, and myself, and the world'.
- ISBN 978-0-313-31748-4.
1872 19 February: Sixth edition of The Origin of Species is published (3,000 copies printed). [63] 26 November: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is published (7,000 copies printed; 5,267 sold). 1874 Second edition of The ...
- PMID 12042386
- ^ Prodger, Phillip (2009) Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution Oxford University Press
- ^ Muybridge, Eadweard (1984) The Male and Female Figure in Motion: 60 classic photographic sequences New York: Dover Publications
- ^ Prodger, Phillip (2003) Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the instantaneous photography movement The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University, in association with Oxford University Press
- ^ Pettigrew, James Bell (1874) Animal Locomotion, or, Walking, Swimming and Flying, with a dissertation on Aeronautics New York: D. Appleton and Co.
- ^ Pettigrew, James Bell (1908) Design in Nature, 3 vols, London: Longman
- ^ Smith, Jonathan (2006) Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Cambridge University Press, especially pp. 179–243
- ^ Cannon, Walter B. (1915) Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage – An Account of Recent Researches into the Function of Emotional Excitement New York: D. Appleton and Co.
- ^ Barrett, Lisa Feldman (2017) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of The Brain New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt and London: Macmillan
- ^ [Crichton-Browne, James] (1895) Conversazione, – and the Presidential Address – "On Emotional Expression", Transactions and the Journal of Proceedings of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, Series II, 11, pp. 72–77, Dumfries: The Courier and Herald Offices
- ^ Mitchell, Sir Arthur (1905) About Dreaming, Laughing and Blushing Edinburgh and London: William Green and Sons. Mitchell (pp. 153–157) provides a useful bibliography on emotional expression at the dawn of the twentieth century.
- ^ Sulloway, Frank J. (1979) Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend London: Burnett Books/Andre Deutsch
- ^ Ritvo, Lucille B. (1990) Darwin's Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences New Haven and London: Yale University Press
- ^ Schilder, Paul (1950) The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche New York: International Universities Press
- ^ Morris, Desmond (1978) Manwatching: A Field Guide To Human Behaviour London: Triad Panther.
Sources
- Barrett, Paul (1980), Metaphysics, Materialism, & the Evolution of Mind: the early writings of Charles Darwin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-13659-0,
Early writings of Charles Darwin. With a commentary by Howard E. Gruber
External links
- Darwin, Charles (1872), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, London: John Murray.
- Freeman, R. B. (1977), The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist (2nd ed.), Folkestone: Dawson.
- Ekman, Paul, ed. (2003), Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years after Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1st ed.), New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Free e-book versions:
- D. Appleton, New York, 1899
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals public domain audiobook at LibriVox