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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (46333)	9/23/2002 9:06:59 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The Naked Face This article fascinated me, for obvious reasons. It's very important to lawyers to know when clients and witnesses are telling the truth. The more I read about the research, the more interested I became. This is the part that really intrigued me: >>In the nineteen-sixties, a young San Francisco psychologist named Paul Ekman began to study facial expression, and he discovered that no one knew the answers to those questions. Ekman went to see Margaret Mead, climbing the stairs to her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. He had an idea. What if he travelled around the world to find out whether people from different cultures agreed on the meaning of different facial expressions? Mead, he recalls, "looked at me as if I were crazy." Like most social scientists of her day, she believed that expression was culturally determined— that we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions. Charles Darwin had discussed the face in his later writings; in his 1872 book, "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," he argued that all mammals show emotion reliably in their faces. But in the nineteen-sixties academic psychologists were more interested in motivation and cognition than in emotion or its expression. Ekman was undaunted; he began travelling to places like Japan, Brazil, and Argentina, carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces. Everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant. But what if people in the developed world had all picked up the same cultural rules from watching the same movies and television shows? So Ekman set out again, this time making his way through the jungles of Papua New Guinea, to the most remote villages, and he found that the tribesmen there had no problem interpreting the expressions, either. This may not sound like much of a breakthrough. But in the scientific climate of the time it was a revelation. Ekman had established that expressions were the universal products of evolution. There were fundamental lessons to be learned from the face, if you knew where to look.<< Universality of human emotion kind of undercuts multiculturalism, at least a bit, doesn't it?

To: LindyBill who wrote (46333)	9/23/2002 9:30:12 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Thanks, LB. That was really fascinating.

To: LindyBill who wrote (46333)	9/24/2002 4:51:26 AM
From: Eashoa' M'sheekha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Facial Profiling - Gladwell Has Critics Seeing Red. September 11 - 17, 2002 villagevoice.com >>Is Malcolm Gladwell a brilliant thinker and storyteller—or a pollyanna who blithely overhypes his subjects? To fans of the author and New Yorker staff writer, Gladwell is the perfect mix of entertainer and educator, always turning them on to some cool new scientific development. But to a handful of critics, he is a promoter of curious causes with a deceptively one-sided narrative style. One New York editor recently called Gladwell an "intellectual tap dancer"—that is, a writer whose elite audience is so hypnotized by his performance that they don't notice the details he is leaving out.<< Inneresting.No?