How We Recognize Angry and Happy Emotion in People, Places, and Things

Darwin proposed and Ekman and Izard confirmed the presence of cross-cultural regularities in facial displays of emotion. Following their work, the author and his colleagues sought to find parallel mechanisms that would permit these displays to be decoded. A cross-cultural comparison of the display of anger and happiness in masks used in ritual social functions revealed that a set of geometric patterns, rather than actual facial features, conveyed these different emotional meanings. The power of nonrepresentational visual patterns to produce meaning was examined in a series of studies using materials that presented geometric shapes in a variety of line drawings, large-scale physical movement in classical ballet, and configurations among individuals in 17th-century Dutch art. Results across all studies suggested that for the emotions of anger and happiness, at least, meaning is carried in the geometric properties of the visual display.