On the remote Trobriand Islands, researchers studied villagers鈥� reactions to images of facial expressions and found their reactions differed from Western societies. (All photography by Carlos Crivelli and Sergio Jarillo)
How people around the world interpret facial expressions may not be a matter of universal human nature, according to a new study of an isolated Papua New Guinea community by Boston College Professor of Psychology James A. Russell and colleagues.
What the team discovered among villagers of the remote Trobriand Islands challenges the common perception that facial expressions communicate universal messages and meanings regardless of the society or culture, according to a report published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Adolescents from the Trobriander community were shown a set of pictures of facial expressions and asked to attribute emotions, social motives, or both to the images. When shown the image of a gasping face, they matched it to someone displaying anger or an imminent threat.
Subjects in Spain, when shown the same gasping face image as part of the experiment, assigned it to someone expressing fear or readiness to submit.
In a second approach, the two study groups were asked to select the face that was threatening, predictive of an aggressor鈥檚 physical attack. The Trobrianders chose the gasping face, while the subjects in Spain chose a scowling face categorized as 鈥渁nger.鈥�
The findings from researchers at Boston College, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and the American Museum of Natural History challenge approaches to behavioral ecology and psychology.
鈥淏oth common sense and science conducted in North American and Europe came to the conclusion that the gasping face is seen by every human being, whatever their culture, as fear and submission. So, our finding is indeed surprising,鈥� said Russell, whose research centers on human emotion.
Scientists, including Charles Darwin, have been trying to determine whether or not all humans experience the same basic emotions. The leading research to date has held that facial expressions 鈥� and the emotions they represent 鈥� are universally understood.
Still, he said the observations of ethnologists more than three decades prior in different small-scale societies offered some similar evidence to the new findings. Artifacts dating back to the 19th聽century show the Trobrianders鈥� own material culture has portrayed the gasping face 鈥� known in the local dialect as聽ekapunipuni matala migila聽鈥� as an iconic threat display, Russell said.
As an alternative to the theory that human emotions and their expression are universal, Russell developed the idea of 鈥渕inimal universality鈥� in 1995. While there are a fixed number of expressions human facial muscles can crea