The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

  • Charles Darwin
Third edition, with introduction, afterword and commentaries by Paul Ekman. HarperCollins/Oxford University Press: 1998. Pp.473 £16.99 $30
Seconding that emotion: she may not have liked it, but Ekman's findings back up Darwin's work.

Almost everyone has heard of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and many will have heard of his book The Descent of Man. These books disseminated the theory that now stands as the framework for the biological sciences. But his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is less well known, except possibly among readers in the field of psychology. This book is where Darwin laid out his highly original thesis that emotional expressions in humans have their counterparts in the behaviour of other species, suggesting an evolved commonality of form and function.

The first edition came out in 1872 and sold 9,000 copies in the first four months. The text contains a wealth of detail from a wide range of primate species, describing the expression of fear, anger, contentment and sadness. It relates these to observations of the behaviour of human infants. Some of the observations were drawn directly from his descriptions of his own child: for example, where he details the expression of guilt on his son's face when the boy was just two years old.

The second edition of the book was edited by Darwin's son Francis, and appeared in 1889, seven years after Charles Darwin died. Francis appears to have brought it out because Charles had prepared many revisions and additional material not available in the first edition.

Now, more than a century later, the world's leading Darwin scholar on the subject of the emotions, Paul Ekman, has produced a treasure trove of a third edition. Ekman is widely known in this field for his empirical contribution to defining the musculature of facial expressions of emotion, effectively rendering what was once a phenomenon characterized only by subjective description (and thus difficult to study scientifically) into a branch of physiology where objective measurement could be practised.

Ekman's own work has not been confined simply to validating the muscular changes in emotion, although this has been a major advance in the field. He has also studied both recognition and expression of emotion in every aspect, but perhaps most famously in cross-cultural studies. His finding that a core set of emotions are universal, irrespective of culture, is of course a result perfectly predicted from the Darwinian theory.

It might amuse readers to hear that Ekman set out to study emotional recognition in far-away tribes in non-literate parts of the world just to prove Darwin wrong. As the results turned out, Ekman's apriori cultural determinist view was refuted, Darwin's biological determinist view was upheld, and the results steered Ekman into a career that generated an enormous wealth of new data in this field.

Ekman has produced this third edition so as to bring Darwin's book into contact with this new data. Darwin's ideas were mostly based on anecdote, correspondence, some observation and speculation. Many of these ideas have been confirmed by later work, and Ekman's editorial commentary throughout the text helps the reader to sort out which of these have stood the test of time, and which Darwin simply got wrong. To ensure they are balanced, commentaries are also based on correspondence from a distinguished panel of international researchers working on emotion.

This new text is scholarship at its best. The strength of Darwin's writing still shines through, as well as his drive to explain the form of each emotional expression: why is blushing associated with embarrassment? Why do we purse our lips when we concentrate? But Darwin's own account is now properly set in the contemporary scientific context. The commentaries appear in boxes within the text, producing the effect of a dialogue between Darwin and modern science, bridging the century.

The publishers immodestly include a subtitle on the front cover that reads “Definitive Edition”. This is a fair description as we leave the twentieth century, although it might be seen as a touch myopic by reviewers of future editions. Time will tell. But without doubt, this new book will be required reading for Darwin scholars of emotion.

Principles of Geology

  • Charles Lyell
Penguin: £9.99

Related book

A new paperback edition of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology has just been published (Penguin, £9.99). Darwin constantly referred to this work while voyaging on The Beagle. It has now been edited into a single volume by the historian of science James Secord, who also provides an introduction outlining Lyell's writing strategy and an explanation of the book's enormous cultural impact. A bibliography of reviews is also included.