In the 1970s, when Richard Davidson was a graduate student, the study of feelings had been out of fashion for decades. Behaviorism, which dominated brain science in the 20th century, deemed emotions too subjective and squishy for proper scientific inquiry. But in that decade, new techniques and tools—and a new outlook—inspired young scientists like Davidson to rethink this prejudice. A long-forgotten work by Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published a century earlier, provided guidance for their inquiries.
In this book, Darwin makes two fundamental arguments: All people share some of the same facial expressions, and humans’ emotional expressions are related to animals’. He was responding to the prominent Scottish neurologist, Sir Charles Bell, who asserted that expressions were exclusively human. And at the same time, Darwin was gathering more evidence for his theory of evolution. The similarities from person to person, and between humans and animals, testified to our common ancestry.
The operating principles of nerve cells were only just being discovered at the time Darwin wrote, and his understanding of the brain was sketchy. Nonetheless, says Davidson (who is now William James and Vilas professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison), the fact that Darwin thought so carefully about expressions is crucial. “Darwin’s work really paved the way for the modern scientific study of emotion,” he says. “I still remember the feeling I had when I read it as a graduate student. Here was one of the greatest thinkers of the modern scientific era who really took emotions seriously and understood the evolutionary role that emotions play in our important behavior.” Davidson has become one of the most influential scientific experts in affective neuroscience. That field is documenting the relationships between brain activity, expressions, and subjective feelings—evidence for the ideas Darwin pioneered a century ago.
Making Monkey Faces
Monkeys and apes have fascinating faces, and in them Darwin saw human expression reflected—like an orangutan smiling with very recognizable pleasure after being tickled.
