The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

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The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals  
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals title page.jpg
Author(s) Charles Darwin
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Subject(s) Evolutionary theory human behaviour
Publisher John Murray
Publication date 1872

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is a book by Charles Darwin, published in 1872, concerning genetically determined aspects of behaviour. It was published thirteen years after On The Origin of Species and is, alongside his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin's main consideration of human origins. Most unusually, Darwin sought out the opinions of some eminent British psychiatrists in the preparation of the book and it is generally regarded as Darwin's main contribution to psychology. The Expression of the Emotions is also - like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - an important landmark in the history of book illustration.

Contents

[edit] History of the Book

Figure 21, "Horror and Agony", from a photograph by Guillaume Duchenne (more images)

In July 1838 - a few days after Queen Victoria's coronation - Charles Darwin opened his private notebook on "metaphysics" (philosophical speculation) - the M Notebook - and, over the next three months, filled it with his thoughts about the possible interaction of hereditary factors with the mental and behavioural aspects of human and animal life.[1] The critical importance of this notebook has been customarily viewed in its relationship to Darwin's conception of natural selection as the central mechanism of evolutionary development - which he seems to have grasped around September 1838.[2][3][4] Another striking aspect of these notes is their tentative and fragmented quality which finds its fullest expression in Darwin's descriptions of conversation with his father (a successful doctor with a special interest in psychiatric illness) about recurring patterns of behaviour in succeeding generations of his patients' families.[5] Darwin was anxious about the materialistic drift in his thinking - and of the disrepute which this could attract in early Victorian England - at the time, he was mentally preparing for marriage with his cousin Emma Wedgwood who was possessed of refined Christian sensibilities. On 21 September 1838, Darwin recorded a confused and disturbing dream in which he was involved in a public execution at which the corpse came to life and claimed to have faced death like a hero.[6] The point which emerges is that Darwin arrived at some central aspects of evolutionary theory at the exact moment in which he was considering - almost obsessively - a scientific understanding of human behaviour and family life. A full discussion of the significance of Darwin's early notebooks - together with an annotated presentation of their text - can be found in Paul H. Barrett's Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind - Early Writings of Charles Darwin (1980).[1]

"One is tempted to believe phrenologists are right about habitual exercise of the mind altering form of head, and thus these qualities become hereditary....When a man says I will improve my powers of imagination, and does so, - is not this free will...." Charles Darwin (1838) The M Notebook.

"To avoid stating how far I believe in Materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent, which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock - (and phrenologists state that brain alters)...." Charles Darwin (1838) The M Notebook.

Little of this was to surface in On The Origin of Species in 1859,[7] although Chapter 7 contains a mildly expressed argument concerning the nature of instinctive behaviour. In the public management of his evolutionary theory, Darwin understood that its relevance to human emotional life could carry explosively negative consequences. Nevertheless, while preparing the text of The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication in 1866, Darwin took the decision to focus his public statement of evolutionary biology with a book on human ancestry, sexual selection and secondary sexual characteristics including emotional expression. After his initial correspondence with the psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne[8] Darwin set aside his material concerning emotional expression in order to complete The Descent of Man which covered human ancestry and sexual selection. Darwin concluded work on The Descent of Man on 15th January 1871. On 17th January 1871, he started work on his newly independent book The Expression of the Emotions, employing the unused material on emotional expression; and, on 22nd August 1872, he finished work on the proofs. In this way, Darwin brought his evolutionary theory into close approximation with behavioural science, although many Darwin scholars have remarked on a kind of spectral Lamarckism haunting the text of the Emotions.

Darwin notes the universal nature of expressions in the book: "...the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements". This connection of mental states to the neurological organization of movement (as the word emotion suggests) was central to Darwin's understanding of emotion. Darwin himself displayed many biographical links between his psychological life and locomotion, taking long, solitary walks around Shrewsbury after his mother's death in 1817, in his seashore rambles near Edinburgh with the Lamarckian evolutionist Robert Edmond Grant in 1826/1827,[9][10][11] and in the laying out of the sandwalk - his "thinking path" - at Down House in Kent in 1846.[12] These aspects of Darwin's personal development are discussed in John Bowlby's (1990) psychoanalytic biography of Darwin.[13]

"Mental qualities are determined by the size, form and constitution of the brain; and these are transmitted by hereditary descent." George Combe (1828) The Constitution of Man.

Darwin points to a shared human and animal ancestry in sharp contrast to the arguments deployed in Charles Bell's Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824)[14][15] which claimed that there were divinely created human muscles to express uniquely human feelings. Bell's famous aphorism on the subject was: "expression is to the passions as language is to thought". In the Expression, Darwin reformulates the issues at play: "The force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the face and body" - hinting at a neurological intimacy of language with psychomotor function (body language). However, Darwin agreed with Bell's emphasis on the expressive functions of the muscles of respiration. (This is an interesting opinion in view of Bowlby's diagnostic conjecture that most of the symptoms of Darwin's long term illness arose from an anxiety-related hyperventilation syndrome).[16] Darwin had listened to a remarkable attack on Bell's opinions delivered by the phrenologist William A.F. Browne - an assistant to George Combe - at the Plinian Society in December 1826 when he was a medical student at Edinburgh University. However, Darwin later explained that he had been alerted to Bell's theory of expression in 1840, when he chanced on the first edition of Bell's book during a visit to his wife's family in Staffordshire. An important discussion of Darwin's response to Bell's neurological theories is provided by Lucy Hartley in her Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth Century Culture (2001).[17]

In the composition of the book, Darwin drew on world-wide responses to his questionnaire (circulated in the early months of 1867) concerning emotional expression in different ethnic groups, on hundreds of photographs of actors, babies and children, and on descriptions of psychiatric patients in the West Riding Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Darwin carried out an unusually extensive and remarkable correspondence with James Crichton-Browne, the superintendent of the Wakefield asylum. At the time, Crichton-Browne was preparing his enormously influential West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports. Crichton-Browne was the son of the phrenologist William A.F. Browne and Darwin remarked to him that the book "should be called by Darwin and Browne".[18] Darwin also drew on his personal experience of the symptoms of bereavement, highlighting an autobiographical aspect to the book. Darwin considered other approaches to the study of emotions, including their depiction in the arts - discussed by the anatomist Robert Knox in his Manual of Artistic Anatomy (1852) and by the actor Henry Siddons in his Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1807) - but abandoned them as unreliable sources of information. (In 1833, Siddons' sister, Cecilia Siddons, married the phrenologist George Combe).

Illustration of grief from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

[edit] Structure of the Book

Darwin opens the book with three chapters on "the general principles of expression", followed by a section (three more chapters) on modes of emotional expression peculiar to particular species, including man. He then moves on to the main argument with his characteristic approach of astonishingly widespread and detailed observations. Chapter 7 discusses "low spirits", including anxiety, grief, dejection and despair; and the contrasting Chapter 8 "high spirits" with joy, love, tender feelings and devotion. Subsequent chapters include considerations of "reflection and meditation" (associated with "ill-temper", sulkiness and determination), Chapter 10 on hatred and anger, Chapter 11 on "disdain, contempt, disgust, guilt, pride, helplessness, patience and affirmation" and Chapter 12 on "surprise, astonishment, fear and horror". In Chapter 13, Darwin discussses complex emotional states including self-attention, shame, shyness, modesty and blushing. Throughout these chapters, Darwin's concern was to show how human expressions link human movements with emotional states, and are genetically determined and derive from purposeful animal actions. Darwin received dozens of photographs of psychiatric patients from Crichton-Browne, but included in the book only one engraving based on these illustrations - sent on 6th June 1870 (along with Darwin's copy of Duchenne) (Darwin Correspondence Project: Letter 7220) - and this - Figure 19 - was of a patient (with erection of her hair) under the care of Dr James Gilchrist at the Southern Counties Asylum (Crichton Royal) in Dumfries.

Darwin concluded work on the book with a sense of relief. The attacks on his work by the Roman Catholic biologist St George Mivart in 1871/1872 had coincided with a severe aggravation of Darwin's illness, with mysterious symptoms (including vomiting, sweating, sighing and weeping); but the intervention of Thomas Henry Huxley with a savage review of Mivart's Genesis of Species (1871) and Darwin's continuing correspondence with James Crichton-Browne (amounting to more than forty letters with many enclosures) seemed to encourage a resolution of his symptoms as he brought his work on emotional expression to a conclusion. In the last decade of his life (1873–1882), Darwin's health was generally much improved. The complex interaction of Darwin's symptoms with his scientific theories and with his personal and family bereavements and relationships remains a considerable puzzle.[citation needed][says who?]

[edit] Cultural Relations of the Book

The proofs, tackled by his daughter Henrietta ("Ettie") and son Leo, required a major revision which made Darwin "sick of the subject and myself, and the world". It was to be one of the first books with photographs - with seven heliotype plates, and the publisher John Murray warned that this "would poke a terrible hole in the profits". In the event, the published book displayed an extraordinary assembly of illustrations - almost in the manner of a Victorian family album - with engravings of the Darwin family's domestic pets, portraits by the faintly disreputable Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander (1813–1875) ("of Victoria Street, London"), anatomical diagrams by Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) and Friedrich Henle (1809–1885) and illustrational quotations from the Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine - Analyse Electro-Physiologique de L'Expression des Passions (1862) by the eminent French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–1875).[19] Darwin was careful to ensure Duchenne's agreement to his association with the project and the two men corresponded briefly. Duchenne's involvement brought a dramatic and psychological dimension to Darwin's book - he had been a powerful influence on Jean-Martin Charcot (1825 - 1893) - Charcot often referred to Duchenne as "mon maître" ("my teacher") and sat with Duchenne on his deathbed. Duchenne's complicated classic introduced a number of novel themes, including clinical photography as well as his technique of the electrical stimulation of the facial muscles supplied by the seventh cranial (facial) nerve. On 8th June 1869, Darwin sent his copy of Duchenne's book to Crichton-Browne, seeking his opinion. Crichton-Browne seems to have mislaid the book in his asylum for almost a year, causing Darwin some anxiety; but, on 6th June 1870, the book was returned, along with a photograph of a patient with her hair in a state of occasional erection (Darwin Correspondence Project: Letter 7220), which Darwin incorporated into the text - Figure 19 - of the Expression of the Emotions. Two years later, Crichton-Browne invited David Ferrier to Wakefield to conduct experiments on the electrical stimulation of the motor centres in the brain.

The lavish style of scientific illustration[20] was followed in work on animal locomotion (co-ordinated movement) by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904)[21][22] and James Bell Pettigrew[23][24] (1832–1908); and, also, in D'Arcy Thompson's masterpiece of mathematical biology On Growth and Form (1917).[25] Darwin himself, inveterately original, moved from animal locomotion - and emotional life - to the puzzles of insectivorous plants and The Power of Movement in Plants in his book of that title in 1880. Much of the theme of mental evolution - the biological acquisition of mental powers - was taken up by George Romanes (1848–1894). As the torch of anti-Darwinism passed from the theologians to the social scientists, Darwin's biological interpretation of the emotions was to prove something of a dead-end for a century or so. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead emphasised the cultural determinants of emotional expression, arguing that expression varies fundamentally from one culture to another. However, empirical research by Paul Ekman and others has shown this view to be misconceived. Since around 1970, in an atmosphere newly receptive to the biological approaches to human behaviour, it has become clear that there were distinguished scientific contributions which followed up Darwin's ideas. These include William James' What Is An Emotion ? (1884), Walter Cannon's Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1915)[26] - in which Cannon coined the famous phrase fight or flight response - and Schachter and Singer's (1962) studies on the interaction of social, psychological and physical factors in the generation of emotional states. On 24th January 1895, Crichton-Browne delivered a notable lecture[27] (in Dumfries, Scotland) On Emotional Expression, discussing some reservations concerning Darwin's formulations, emphasising the role of the brain and hands in emotional expression, and touching on the issues of gender and expressive asymmetry, and on the relationship of physical expression to language. Thorstein Veblen's sociological classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) assumed an evolutionary perspective and advanced a persuasive narrative concerning the elaboration of gesture and posture into a culturally encoded system of decorum and good manners. In 2003, the New York Academy of Sciences published Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years after Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a Compendium of 37 papers with current research on the subject.

"George Herbert was wrong when he said that man was all symmetry; it was woman to whom that remark applied....evolution is still going on, and the faces of men and women still altering, for the better, every day. The emotions are less violently expressed....our ancestors gave vent to their feelings in a way that we would be ashamed of, and their range of feeling seems to have been in some degree more limited. The language of the countenance, like that of the tongue, has been enriched in the process of the suns." James Crichton-Browne (1895) On Emotional Expression.

"All these sensations and innervations belong to the field of "The Expression of the Emotions", which, as Darwin (1872) has taught us, consists of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose. These may now for the most part have become so much weakened that the expression of them in words seems to us to be only a figurative picture of them, whereas in all probability the description was once meant literally; and hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words...." Sigmund Freud (1895) Studies On Hysteria.

It is noteworthy that Freud's early publications on the symptoms of hysteria - with their influential concept of emotional conflict - acknowledged debts to Darwin's work on emotional expression,[28] that Freud's later Interpretation of Dreams (1900) - a work which lingered on the immediate presentation of mental processes - contained no illustrations, and that Darwin published nothing on dreams as a mode of emotional expression. Indeed, Darwin's approach in The Expression has been criticised for neglecting the communicative aspects of expression. Freud's ideas concerning the psychological aspects of the human body were developed further - notably including the concept of body image - by the neuropsychiatrist Paul Schilder[29] - and an exhaustive discussion of Darwin's impact on psychoanalysis was provided by Lucille Ritvo[30]. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals proved to be very popular, perhaps surprisingly, with a Victorian readership more accustomed to hearing about the virtues of self-control (inhibition) rather than the value of self-expression. On 1 November 1872, Darwin sent a copy of the book to Sarah Haliburton (Owen), sister of Fanny Owen, his girlfriend when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. In December 1872, Darwin corresponded briefly with the mathematician and photographer Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1832–1898), author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - illustrated by Sir John Tenniel (1820–1914) - and Dodgson sent Darwin a photograph of "an emotional expression" (portrait of Flora Rankin). Today, Darwin's book can be viewed as a pioneering work in the burgeoning field of behavioural genetics. Some critics have regarded Darwin's sketches of animal behaviour as anthropomorphic, and the whole book as curiously Lamarckian in character. It quickly sold around 7000 copies and was widely praised as a charming and accessible introduction to Darwin's evolutionary theories.

Figure 4: "A small dog watching a cat on a table", made from a photograph by Oscar Gustave Rejlander

A second edition was published by Darwin's son around 1889. It did not contain several revisions wanted by Darwin, which were not published until the third edition of 1999 (edited by Paul Ekman).[31]

[edit] See Also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Barrett 1980
  2. ^ Barrett 1980, p. xviii
  3. ^ Ospovat, Dov (1981) The Development of Darwin's Theory Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  4. ^ Mayr, Ernst (1991) One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the genesis of modern evolutionary thought, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press
  5. ^ Barrett 1980, pp. 6–37
  6. ^ Browne, E. Janet (1995) Charles Darwin: Voyaging, London: Jonathan Cape, pp 383 - 384.
  7. ^ Barrett 1980, p. xix
  8. ^ Pearn, Alison M. (2010) "This Excellent Observer..." : the Correspondence between Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne, 1869 - 75, History of Psychiatry, 21, 160 - 175
  9. ^ Desmond, Adrian (1982) Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850 - 1875 Chicago: Chicago University of Chicago Press, pp 116 - 121
  10. ^ Desmond, Adrian (1989) The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London Chicago: University of Chicago Press
  11. ^ Stott, Rebecca (2003) Darwin and the Barnacle, London: Faber and Faber
  12. ^ Boulter, Michael (2006) Darwin's Garden: Down House and the Origin of Species London: Constable
  13. ^ Bowlby, John (1990) Charles Darwin, A Biography London: Hutchinson.
  14. ^ Bell, Charles (1806) Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting London:
  15. ^ Bell, Charles (1824) Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression London: John Murray
  16. ^ Bowlby, pp. 6 - 14
  17. ^ Hartley, Lucy (2001) Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth Century Culture, Cambridge University Press
  18. ^ Walmsley, Tom (1993) Psychiatry in Descent: Darwin and the Brownes, Psychiatric Bulletin, 17, 748 - 751
  19. ^ Duchenne (de Boulogne), G.-B., (1990) The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression by Guillaume-Benjamin (Amand) Duchenne de Boulogne edited and translated by R. Andrew Cuthbertson, Cambridge University Press and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de L'Homme, originally published (1862) Paris: Editions Jules Renouard, Libraire
  20. ^ Prodger, Phillip (2009) Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution Oxford University Press
  21. ^ Prodger, Phillip (2003) Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the instantaneous photography movement The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University, in association with Oxford University Press
  22. ^ Muybridge at Tate Britain (Tate Britain)
  23. ^ Pettigrew, James Bell (1874) Animal Locomotion, or, Walking, Swimming and Flying, with a dissertation on Aeronautics New York: D. Appleton and Co.
  24. ^ Pettigrew, James Bell (1908) Design in Nature, 3 vols, London: Longman
  25. ^ Smith, Jonathan (2006) Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Cambridge University Press, especially pp. 179 - 243
  26. ^ Cannon, Walter B., (1915) Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage - An Account of Recent Researches into the Function of Emotional Excitement New York: D. Appleton and Co.
  27. ^ [Crichton-Browne, James](1895) Conversazione, and the Presidential Address - "On Emotional Expression", Transactions and the Journal of Proceedings of the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society, Series II, 11, pp 72-77, Dumfries: The Courier and Herald Offices
  28. ^ Sulloway Frank J., (1979) Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend London: Burnett Books/Andre Deutsch
  29. ^ Schilder, Paul (1950) The Image and Appearance of the Human Body New York: International Universities Press
  30. ^ Ritvo, Lucille B., (1990) Darwin's Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences New Haven and London: Yale University Press
  31. ^ Black, J (Jun 2002), "Darwin in the world of emotions" (Free full text), Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95 (6): 311–3, doi:10.1258/jrsm.95.6.311, ISSN 0141-0768, PMC 1279921, PMID 12042386, http://www.jrsm.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=12042386 

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