Abstract
I argue in this paper that the claimed universal recognition of basic emotions corresponds to the recognition of conventionalized representations of emotions common in our culture. Section one presents some of the faces that people make in different circumstances, and argues that making faces is a form of action. Faces made function as narrative tools and as conversational tools. Section two compares and contrasts two conceptions of facial displays: basic emotion theories (BET) and the behavioral ecology view (BECV). The next section analyzes and evaluates BET’s claim concerning the universal expression of emotions. Section four argues that the still pictures of posed emotions used by Ekman correspond to conventionalized iconographic representations of emotions in our culture. The last section asks whether present day social robots can make faces. They cannot for two reasons, I argue. First because of the dominance of BET in robotic research, second because robots do not need to enter into strategic negotiation with their human partners. The faces of robots simply reproduce conventionalized expressions of emotions, that they do paradoxically bear witness to the central relevance of the behavioral ecology view of facial displays.
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Notes
This may have been the intuition underlying Scarantino’s (2017) attempt to unify the best aspects of both theories.
See (Fridlund 1994, p. 222) for a description of how that original choice was made.
This is most frequently the case. However, some robots, for example Robisuke, do not try to reproduce human emotions. Robisuke uses a system that analyzes prosody to extract the proper feedback timing in terms of head, eye or body movement. Such an approach views communication between a human and a robot as a dynamic, multi-level, multi-modal process. Rather than to recognize or reproduce the emotions of its partner, the aim here is for the robot to respond “appropriately” in the context of a dynamic exchange.
We analyze this in detail in (Dumouchel and Damiano 2017).
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Dumouchel, P. Making Faces. Topoi 41, 631–639 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09799-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09799-w