Does a frown mean the same thing in every culture?

Does a frown mean the same thing in every culture? Charles Darwin thought so. In 1872 he theorized that emotions were evolved traits universal to the human species. But in the 1950s the prevalent belief, particularly among anthropologists, was that facial expressions and their meanings were learned. The psychologist Paul Ekman set out to test it.

His most famous test took him to the South Fore people of New Guinea, a pre-industrial culture that was isolated from the West. Participants heard brief stories about emotional events, such as a happy or a sad one, and each time picked the matching face from an array of three. They chose the correct face on 64 to 90 percent of trials, well above the one in three expected by chance, but had difficulty telling the fear face from the surprise face. In a later cross-cultural study, in 1992, Ekman and colleagues concluded that there are six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

To explain why people from different places still behave differently, Ekman and his colleague Wallace Friesen proposed display rules: culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom, and when. These rules could explain how cultural differences conceal a universal effect of expression.

The claim was not welcomed everywhere. Ekman recounted that at meetings from 1967 to 1969 some anthropologists were hostile, and one shouted that his ideas were fascist.

Critics later raised methodological objections. They argue that the method typically used inflates recognition scores. Part of the problem is forced choice: people pick from a short list of labels, so the labels supply the answer. The faces are also posed, and the rare studies of spontaneous expressions find lower recognition. Both sides agree that the face expresses emotion. The dispute is over how specific the information it carries is, and reviews of the universality hypothesis have been both supportive and critical.