History of facial expressions in 5 minutes

Theories from Aristotle to Ekman to better understand what facial expressions mean and how to analyze them

Early theories of facial expressions

“Everyone knows that grief involves a gloomy and joy a cheerful countenance…There are characteristic facial expressions which are observed to accompany anger, fear, erotic excitement, and all the other passions.” — Aristotle

Emotional facial expression have fascinated great thinkers since ancient times. The likes of Aristotle and Plato thought that facial expressions can be a window into people’s feelings as well as a reliable indicator of their stable characteristics and qualities. Aristotle considered it common sense that people have shared intuitions about how different facial expressions represent specific emotions and proposed the notion of physiognomy that facial features can also help infer people’s characters.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, the idea of physiognomy persisted to modern times. By the 17th century, scholars such as Johann Lavater published detailed sketches asserting how silhouettes of faces could reveal the moral characters of individuals. Influenced by Lavater but not completely convinced by his arguments, French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne took a step back to focus on how facial expressions revealed people’s emotions rather than their moral characters.