"Q. More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that human facial expressions are universal. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead thought the opposite. What do you think?
A. Initially, back in 1965, I thought Margaret Mead was probably right. But I decided to get the evidence to settle the argument. I showed pictures of facial expressions to people in the U.S., Japan, Argentina, Chile and Brazil and found that they judged the expressions in the same way.
But this was not conclusive because all these people could have learned the meaning of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. I needed visually isolated people unexposed to the modern world and the media.
I found them in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the West."
You can read a little more about Dr. Paul Ekman in Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Here's a link to the Amazon "look inside the book" page 155 and page 156 where Daniel Pinkman discusses the universal human ability to recognize facial expressions.
As Daniel Pink says in his book,
"Empathy is largely about emotion - feeling what another is feeling. But emotions generally don't reveal themselves in L-Directed (left brain - analytical) ways. "People's emotions are rarely put into words; far more often they are expressed throught other cues" writes Daniel Goleman. "Just as the mode of the rational mind is words the mode of the emotions is nonverbal" And the main canvas for displaying those emotions is the face. With fourty-three tiny muscles that tug and stretch and lift our mouth, eyes, cheeks, eyebrows, and forehead, our faces can convey the full range of human feeling. Since Empathy depends on emotion and since emotion is conveyed nonverbally, to enter another's heart, you must begin the journey by looking into his face."
Emotional Intelligence : Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
by Daniel Goleman
