Customer Reviews

Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View

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In this book Alan Fridlund attempts to re-frame some of our views about human affect by looking at facial movement as a phenomenon that is intrinsically connected to social interaction. He explores complex evolutionary explanations for our facial expressions, and does indeed have some worthwhile ideas. Unfortunately, I think he takes a good thing too far when he completely dismisses subjective emotional experience as an important factor in affect. He describes facial behavior as being embedded in a complex web of social cues, and does not seem to believe that there is even such a thing as spontaneous, neurologically triggered affect. His explanation for the fact that we laugh and cry when we are alone is that we are communicating to an imagined social partner. He goes as far as to dismiss the very EXISTENCE of emotions, derisively putting quotes around the very word. This makes for a very strange read, almost as if the book were written by a bemused Vulcan who is struggling to explain the perplexing behavior of human beings.
If nothing else, studies of blind infant behavior seem like adequate proof of some degree of innateness. The behaviorist explanation of this phenomenon is absurd; imagine newborn infants stumbling upon a display as obscure as crying through an elaborate process of trial and error! They would be thirty by the time they shed their first tears.
I would suggest that Fridlund's ideas about the ecological nature of affect do not exclude the possibility of innate expressions. Humans evolved as an intensely social species--our cohesiveness is the reason for our success. Early band society was quite different from our stratified modern life; members of the group were extremely close-knit and interdependent. It makes sense that we would evolve to display spontaneous, unambiguous signals of our subjective states in order to bond and demonstrate our needs. It also makes sense that we would develop ornate embellishments of our facial movements in our interactions of play, communication and deceit. (By the way, I am not a proponent of Ekman's work, which I also find deeply flawed and highly overrated!)