CHAPTER IX.. The External Conditions of Emotion

THE EXTERNAL CONDITIONS OF EMOTION

Empiric period—Pre-Darwinian period of scientific research—Examination of Darwin’s three principles—Wundt and his explanatory formulas: Innervation directly modified, Association of analogous sensations, Relations of motion with sensory representations.

The movements of the eyes, mouth, face, the upper and lower limbs and trunk, and the modifications of the voice constitute the external expression of emotion which is principally reducible to muscular action. For the last half-century this subject has been studied in works so well known that it behoves us to be very brief. I shall confine myself to indicating the actual state of the question.

For some thousands of years this question remained in the stage of pure empiricism, or of so-called scientific speculations which had scarcely a better reputation than alchemy, astrology, or chiromancy. J. Müller, in the name of physiology, declared the expression of the emotions completely inexplicable. However, the researches were already beginning which were to prove him mistaken—those of Lavater with his rare talent of personal observation, and those of Charles Bell by a more objective method. After this, Duchenne, of Boulogne, went still further, substituting experiment for mere observation. It is well known that, in the case of an old man suffering from facial anæsthesia, he caused the contraction of an isolated muscle, by the aid of electricity, and thus produced certain modes of expression in the countenance. He concluded from this that the contraction of a single muscle often suffices to express a passion; and that every emotion has, so to speak, its accurate, precise, and unique note, produced by a unique local modification. Thus, the frontal is for him the muscle of attention, the upper orbicular of the lips the muscle of reflection, the pyramidal (inter-superciliary) expresses threats; the great zygomatic, laughter; the lesser zygomatic, weeping; the triangular muscle of the lips, disdain, etc. In spite of the somewhat artificial nature of the experiments, and the too sweeping character of the conclusions, this was a great step in advance.

Footnote 85:

Lavater (1741-1801), Essai sur la physionomie destiné à faire connaître l’homme et à le faire aimer; Charles Bell (1806), Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression; Duchenne (1862), Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions. For ancient works on physiognomy, consult Mantegazza’s book on Physiognomy and Expression (Contemporary Science Series).

At last appeared Darwin’s epoch-making work. Supported by the results of a long series of experiments on adults, children, lunatics, animals, members of the different human races, Darwin was the first to put, and to attempt to answer, the fundamental and only question—Why and how is such and such an emotion connected with such and such a movement and not with another? He stated the problem under its scientific form.

Footnote 86:

Duchenne has the following curious passage:—"The Creator, not being obliged to study mechanical requirements, was able, according to His wisdom or (if I may be pardoned for using this form of expression) by a Divine fantasy, to put in action this or that muscle—a single one, or several at once, when it was His will that the signs of the passions, even the most evanescent, should be temporarily inscribed on the human countenance. This physiognomic language once created, it was sufficient, in order to render it universal and immutable, to give to every human being the instinctive faculty of always expressing his feelings by the contraction of the same muscles." Thus, for this writer, the question remains within the region of first causes. He has ascertained a relation of coexistence between a determinate emotion and certain movements of the muscles, but without seeking the reason and the natural explanation of this nexus. We know that certain philosophers hold the theory of the Divine institution of language; this is its equivalent, being a theory of a divinely instituted gesture-language.

In Darwin’s works we find two elements: a detailed and complete description of each individual emotion or affective state—by which we shall profit later on—and the exposition of the general laws of expression, as reduced to three well-known principles. What remains of these three principles after the criticism to which they have been subjected? This is the only point we have, for the moment, to examine.

1. The principle of the association of serviceable habits remains the most firmly established. It consists in admitting that movements which are of service in satisfying a desire, or getting rid of a disagreeable sensation, become habitual, and continue to take place, even when their utility becomes nil, or at any rate doubtful. In other words, there are attitudes, gestures, movements, which can be directly explained, because they are nothing but emotions actualised, objectivised, or embodied, such as the movements of contact in tenderness, of aggression in anger, of erection and swelling in pride. But there are others, of which the explanation is less direct and obvious. How are the contraction of the eyebrows in perplexity, tears in sorrow, the showing of the teeth in anger, to be explained as serviceable to us? According to Darwin, these acts, formerly serviceable, have continued to exist as survivals. Here Darwin’s successors have rightly reproached him with not being enough of a psychologist, and have found a better explanation: the important fact is not the survival of serviceable movements, but the transference of a primitive mode of expression to an analogous emotion.

2. The principle of antithesis has been definitively abandoned; it is purely hypothetical, and explains nothing. According to Darwin, there is a primitive and general tendency to associate with feelings the contrary gestures to those expressing the opposite feeling. Léon Dumont has subjected this assertion to a very close and cogent criticism. Taking, one by one, the facts quoted by Darwin, which, besides, are not very numerous, he has shown that they may be quite otherwise explained.

Footnote 87:

L. Dumont, Théorie scientifique de la sensibilité, chap. vi. p. 236. Fouillée, Psychologie des idées-forces, i. 467, admits Darwin’s principle, but interprets it in another way.

3. The principle of the direct action of the nervous system cannot be placed in line with the other two, because it far surpasses them in generality, and, in relation to it, they are subordinate and not co-ordinate. Before Darwin, Spencer (Principles of Psychology, ii. §§ 495, 502) had stated an analogous principle, to which he reduced the expression of the emotions. He calls it the Law of Nervous Discharge. It may show itself in two forms—the diffused and the restricted. The former depends on the quantity or intensity of the emotion, and serves as its measure. It follows, in its propagation, an invariable course: it affects the muscles in an inverse ratio to their mass and to the weight of the parts they have to move. In man, it acts first on the delicate muscles of the voice and the small facial muscles; then it invades, in succession, the arms, the legs, the trunk. The movements of the tail in dogs and cats, of the ear in horses, and many analogous ones in other animals, are illustrations of this law. The restricted discharge depends on the quality or the nature of the emotion; it is due “to the relations established in the course of evolution between particular feelings and particular sets of muscles habitually brought into play for the satisfaction of them.” This scarcely seems to me to differ from Darwin’s principle of “useful habits.”

Footnote 88:

Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. p. 545.

The Expression of the Emotions gave rise to other publications of the same kind, those of Piderit, Mantegazza, and Warner, who, in his Physical Expression (1885), has attempted a purely objective, and consequently extra-psychological study of the subject. But among all the attempts to trace back expression to its fundamental principles, and find a substitute for Darwin’s (already greatly shaken) theory, that of Wundt seems to me the best. Like his predecessor, he admits three principles (though different from Darwin’s) which can act simultaneously and concur in the production of an isolated movement.

Footnote 89:

Physiologische Psychologie, vol. ii. chap. xxii. He has also treated the question in a special collection of articles entitled Essays.

1. The principle of direct modification of innervation—that is to say, that the intensity of the muscular and vasomotor movements depends on the intensity of the emotions; the movements which most escape the control of the will more especially depend on this principle. This is the equivalent to Darwin’s third principle, placed first, which is, in fact, its right position.

2. The principle of the association of analogous sensations consists in those dispositions of the mind which are analogous to certain sensory impressions, manifesting themselves in the same manner. At the outset, we have only pleasures, pains, and needs of the physical order, whose mode of expression is innate, and, so to speak, anatomical. Later on come the pleasures, pains, and desires of the moral order, which make use of the pre-existent modes of expression in order to show themselves outwardly. It is a language turned aside from its primary signification, which in the order of gestures is the equivalent of a metaphor. This principle explains much more easily than Darwin’s a number of apparently very perplexing modes of expression. If a man, when puzzled, scratches his head, coughs, rubs his eyes, it is because a slight malaise of physical origin and a slight embarrassment of psychical origin have a deep-seated analogy, betraying themselves by the same expressive movements. Wundt has well described the mimicry of the mouth in the tasting of sweet, acid, or bitter substances; as soon as an emotion arises which has some affinity with these gustatory sensations (sweet joy, bitter grief, sharp reproaches), the expression of the mouth, the nose, the face reappears. This is because, in both cases, the state of the feelings, the emotional tone are the same, the expressive movements identical. As Mantegazza has rightly said, there are such things as mimic synonyms.

3. The principle of the relation between movements and sensory representations lies in the fact that the muscular movements of expression relate to imaginary objects. Wundt considers as chiefly amenable to this principle the mimicry of the eyes, the arms, and the hands. We represent something large by raising the hand, a small object by lowering it; the future by a forward movement, the past by a backward one. It might be objected that these gestures indicate intellectual rather than affective states; but it is certain that many emotions have a mimicry addressed to absent objects. Gratiolet (1857) collected a tolerably large number. The indignant man, even if alone, clenches his fist against an absent adversary. We shut our eyes, or turn aside our face, to escape the sight of a disagreeable object; we do the same when disapproving of an opinion. When we approve, we incline the head forward, as if in contemplation. In negation, we turn the head to right and left, exactly as is done by children and animals, when an unattractive object is placed in front of the mouth. The expression of disdain, contempt, disgust, reproduces the physiognomy of a man rejecting nauseating food.

I am not quite sure that Wundt’s third principle is of the same importance as the other two, or that it cannot be reduced to a still simpler form. But the theory I have just summarised, with a few examples borrowed elsewhere, presents itself as the one most calculated to bring out the importance of the physiological factors, unduly neglected by the pioneers of the science.

All the work relating to this question, whatever may be its lacunæ at present, has demonstrated that the expression of the emotions is not an adventitious, purely external, extra-physiological fact, whose study is only incumbent, as science, on the physiologist, and, as art, on the physiognomist, but emotion itself objectivised, its inseparable embodiment. In my opinion, we have to distinguish two strata in the very numerous modes of muscular movement which express the emotions. One is primary, depending on the anatomical and physiological constitution; the other, secondary, depending on the psychological constitution. The relation between them is that which in every developed language exists between the primary and the derived sense of words. Analogy is the great artisan of intellectual language; its action is more restricted as regards emotional language. But when, to the emotion of the first hour, having already its fixed mode of expression, there succeeds a new emotion, which the consciousness, rightly or wrongly, has felt as analogous, the pre-established expressive mechanism has served a new purpose, like an old word whose meaning is extended and modified. In both cases the mind proceeds in the same way, obeying the guidance of one and the same unconscious law.