Emotion and Facial Expression: A Semantic Perspective

This paper addresses some basic conceptual issues which, as the author argues, must be clarified before the real controversies about the nature and universality of emotions and their expression can be clearly stated. To begin with, it argues that interpretative categories such as ‘anger’, ‘fear’, ‘disgust’, ‘sadness’ and ‘enjoyment’ are language-specific and culture-specific, and cannot identify any human universals in the area of emotions (even if such universals did exist). Furthermore, the paper shows how different emotions can be identified in terms of cognitive scenarios associated with them and how cognitive scenarios can be phrased in terms of universal human concepts. It also shows how clearly identifiable ‘facial components’ or configurations of ‘components’ (i.e. aspects of facial behaviour) can be linked with cognitive components (and with feelings identifiable through such components). Finally, it puts forward and illustrates a hypothesis about an iconic basis of the ‘semantics of the human face’. Throughout the paper, the author tries to demonstrate that the use of conceptual primitives allows us to explore human emotions from a universal, language-independent perspective. Since every language imposes its own classification upon human emotional experience, English words such as anger or sadness are cultural artefacts of the English language, not culture-free analytical tools. On the other hand, conceptual primitives such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or ‘want’, ‘know’, ‘say’ and ‘think’ are not cultural artefacts of the English language but belong to the universal ‘alphabet of human thoughts’ apparently lexicalized in all languages of the world. The author argues that basing our analysis on lexical universals we can free ourselves from the bias of our own language and reach a universal, culture-independent perspective on human cognition in general and on human emotions in particular.