Evolution, Emotion, and Facial Behavior

Abstract Most twentieth-century theories of emotion and behaviors mis-cited Darwin to claim that certain facial behaviors evolved to express emotion. Such theories of “facial expressions of emotion” were: (a) misidentified as evolutionary, and (b) biased toward finding universality in facial behaviors; they were mistaken in (c) holding that such universality implied biology but diversity implied culture, and (d) presenting faces as iconic and acontextual. Based on modern evolutionary theory and data, we offer the Behavioral Ecology View of facial displays as an adaptationist framework based on contemporary ethological conceptions of animal signaling and communication. On this view, faces traditionally attributed to emotion are intention movements which act as contextual “social tools” to modify the trajectories of our social interactions and negotiations. These facial behaviors evolved atomistically with their own instrumentality, rather than as outputs of central emotion mechanisms.