Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals sold 9,000 copies in its first printing, becoming a best seller in its day. Expression sparked spirited discussion among scientists and laypeople alike in the parlors and cafés of Victorian England. Perhaps most important to Darwin, the book met with modest smiles of approval from his wife, Emma. She rightly anticipated that a book on emotional expression would unsettle prim and hierarchical Victorian ideology less than Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

In the aftermath of On the Origin of Species, Darwin responded to a barrage of attacks on his theory of evolution. The most impassioned of these attacks centered upon whether natural selection could account for the design of human beings. Creationists were giving way to evolutionary accounts of the origins of rocks, reefs, shales, mollusks, barnacles, and finches. Their empirical open-mindedness had clear limits, though: They recoiled at the possibility that humans themselves were products of evolution, descended from apes, shaped by natural selection, not touched by the hand of God or designed according to ideas of perfectibility.

Emotions have long been a battleground for competing views of human nature. This once again proved to be the case in this clash between evolutionists and creationists. Creationists like the anatomist Sir Charles Bell argued that God had graced humans with special facial muscles that allowed them to express uniquely human emotions, lofty, “higher” moral sentiments like sympathy, shame, or rapture, emotions unknown to “lower” species. The uniqueness of human facial expression, by implication, was proof of the discontinuity of the human species from other species. The subtle emotional expressions you might observe in your spouse or children, Bell reasoned, were the visible traces of the handiwork of God. Those facial muscles were part of a rationale for why humans should be at the top of the great chain of being, master of other species.

With his astounding powers of observation, Darwin took on this challenge. He marshaled an eclectic variety of data to document “mental continuities” between human and animal expression. Amid the fifteen to twenty-five letters that arrived each day at his house from his correspondents (Darwin was a prolific letter writer), observations flowed in about emotional displays in other animals, expressive outbursts that sounded remarkably akin to those of our loved ones. There were detailed accounts of terriers frowning in concentration, pug dogs mugging intelligence, and monkeys throwing temper tantrums. Darwin himself catalogued the emotional displays of his dog Polly, a terrier who lay curled in devotion at Darwin’s feet as he labored on his articles, books, and correspondences in his study. Darwin closely studied his beloved ten children. He relied on the astute observations of mothers he knew to limn the expressions of emotion—wails of pain, laughter and smiling, sulking and tenderness—that emerged early in life. He turned with fervor to a new technology—photography. Darwin collected over 100 photos, photos of actors portraying different emotions and of the specific muscle actions produced by electrical stimulation.

These kinds of data led Darwin to a rich portrayal, the most detailed ever achieved, of human emotional expression. Unlike the scientists who would study emotion some one hundred years later, Darwin posited many different positive emotions, sixteen by my count. His theorizing about the evolution of positive emotions revealed a jen ratio unusually high for our field. The table below summarizes Darwin’s observations, which are a poetic periodic chart of how emotions are expressed, the embodied signatures of brief subjective states.

DARWIN’S DESCRIPTIONS OF EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION

       

EMOTION        

EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIORS        

NEGATIVE EMOTION                

ANGER        

TREMBLE, NOSTRILS RAISED, MOUTH COMPRESSED, FURROWED BROW, HEAD ERECT, CHEST EXPANDED, ARMS RIGID BY SIDES, EYES WIDE OPEN, STAMP GROUND, BODY SWAYS BACKWARDS/FORWARDS        

ANXIETY        

INNER ENDS OF EYEBROWS RAISED, CORNERS MOUTH DEPRESSED        

CONFUSION        

STAMMER, GRIMACES, TWITCHINGS OF FACIAL MUSCLES        

CONTEMPT        

LIP PROTRUSION, NOSE WRINKLE, EXPIRATION, PARTIAL CLOSURE OF EYELIDS, TURN AWAY EYES, NOSE WRINKLE, UPPER LIP RAISED, SNORT, EXPIRATION        

DISAGREEMENT        

CLOSE EYES, TURN AWAY FACE        

DISGUST        

LOWER LIP TURNED DOWN, UPPER LIP RAISED, EXPIRATION, MOUTH OPEN, SPITTING, BLOWING OUT PROTRUDING LIPS, CLEAR THROAT SOUND, LOWER LIP, TONGUE PROTRUDED        

EMBARRASSMENT        

LITTLE COUGH, BLUSH        

FEAR        

TREMBLE, EYES OPEN, MOUTH OPEN, LIPS RETRACTED, EYEBROWS RAISED, CROUCH, PALE, PERSPIRATION, HAIR STANDS ON END, MUSCLES SHIVER, YAWN        

GRIEF