BodyLingual

The human interest in faces may have originated, as Konner (1982) suggests, from a need to unravel kinship as we looked for shared ancestry or not (friend or foe); but for millions of years, the main reason people have looked at one another’s face is to read emotion and attend to messages.  Humans produce over 20,000 different facial expressions but how many are shared? Back in 1872 Charles Darwin wrote in his ground-breaking book, ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’, of there being several universal facial expressions. In the 1960s, Paul Ekman sought to prove or disprove Darwin’s theory. Ekman travelled to Papua New Guinea to study the isolated Fore people. People who had never previously had any contact with outsiders, not even viewing pictures of them (still or moving). Staying with the group as he studied them, Ekman discovered what their facial expression would be in different circumstances, such as if they were preparing to fight, witnessing a child dying, o