Abstract
It has long been claimed that certain configurations of facial movements are universally recognized as emotional expressions because they evolved to signal emotional information in situations that posed fitness challenges for our hunting and gathering hominin ancestors. Experiments from the last decade have called this particular evolutionary hypothesis into doubt by studying emotion perception in a wider sample of small-scale societies with discovery-based research methods. We replicate these newer findings in the Hadza of Northern Tanzania; the Hadza are semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers who live in tight-knit social units and collect wild foods for a large portion of their diet, making them a particularly relevant population for testing evolutionary hypotheses about emotion. Across two studies, we found little evidence of universal emotion perception. Rather, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that people infer emotional meaning in facial movements using emotion knowledge embrained by cultural learning.
Highlights
It has long been claimed that certain configurations of facial movements, such as smiles, scowls, and frowns, are universally recognized as emotional expressions because they evolved to signal emotional information in situations that posed fitness challenges for our hunting and gathering hominin ancestors
To test whether the facial configurations in question evolved to express certain emotion categories in a universal manner, as proposed, scientists have largely studied how people infer the emotional meaning of those configurations; the logic being that the production and perception of emotional expressions co-evolved as an integrated signaling system[2]
Participants either chose a photographed facial configuration to match to a brief vignette that described an emotion category, or chose a photograph to match to an emotion word
Summary
It has long been claimed that certain configurations of facial movements, such as smiles, scowls, and frowns, are universally recognized as emotional expressions because they evolved to signal emotional information in situations that posed fitness challenges for our hunting and gathering hominin ancestors. While small-scale foraging societies are neither analogs of the past nor necessarily living in remote regions untouched by outside cultural influences, they do have characteristics that make them important study populations for psychologists exploring behavioral, cognitive, or emotional phenomena They consume a diet that is largely composed of wild foraged foods, live in highly communal and close-knit social groups, and engage in flexible residence patterning (meaning they choose who they live with) - characteristics most similar to the ecological and social contexts in which emotions and their expressions purportedly evolved. The remaining studies, using a variety of methods (including choice-from-array, perceptual matching, and free-labeling methods) replicate one another in observing substantial variation in the meaning inferred in the facial configurations of interest[24,25,26,27,28] Participants in those studies did not consistently infer the specific emotional meanings proposed by the universality hypothesis.
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