Foreword

Summary

The chapters in this collection represent the best thought on the role and function of human facial behavior, and many of them address what has become central to most contemporary accounts – the link between facial expression and emotion. The arguments for and against such a link between emotion and facial behavior are represented in the following pages. It is in part a theme of this book that the belief in such a link was not always thus in the past and that it need not be thus in the future.

The current predominance of the Tomkins–Izard–Ekman account of the meaning of facial expressions and their strong dependence on emotions started some 30 years ago, and 30 years is generally the lifetime of regnant psychological theories. In recent years, a new wave of thought has emerged and the debate has been joined between those who see facial expression as a necessary accompaniment or precursor of emotional experience, and those who see facial expression as communicative, expressive, and mimetic devices, possibly remnants of an early preverbal language but not necessarily tied to emotion. I joined the wave some 20 years ago and have been delighted by the momentum and the contributors it has gathered in the intervening period – most all of them represented here.

In retrospect, it seems strange that something as palpable and measurable as facial expression should be seen to be immersed in something as vague and intellectually slippery as emotion. Since I have been in the past accused of “not believing in emotion,” let me briefly expand on this theme.