Catharine Abell

Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction

INTRODUCTION 1. Pictorial Diversity 2. Picture This: Demonstrative Reference Through Pictures 3. The Epistemic Value of Photographs 4. Depictive Seeing and Double Content 5. Pictorial Perception as Twofold Experience 6. Inflected Pictorial Experience: Its Treatment and Significance 7. Inflected and Uninflected Experience of Pictures 8. Seeing Things in Pictures Index

The Impact of Context on the Perception of Emotions

Introduction Most human interactions are imbued with emotional exchange. In fact, it is hard to imagine a meaningful interaction in which emotion communication plays no role and even banal everyday transactions such as paying at a supermarket often involve an exchange of smiles or sometimes the expression of displeasure by one or both interaction partners. Importantly, these expressions serve as social signals that provide information about the expresser as well as about the situation (Hess, Kappas and Banse 1995) and that help to coordinate and facilitate interpersonal interaction and communication (Niedenthal and Brauer 2012; Parkinson, Fischer and Manstead 2005). This chapter explores the influence of context on the social signal value of such emotion expressions. What do they in fact tell us about the person or the situation and what influence has the context they occur in on the meaning of the exchange? When considering the impact of context, on the one hand, and the social signals inherent in emotion expressions, on the other, the first question to ask would be what emotions actually signal. The scientific study of emotion expressions is usually traced to Darwins seminal work On the Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animal ([1872] 1965). Darwin understood emotion expressions as the visible part of an underlying emotional state, which are evolved and (at least at some point in the past) adaptive. The notion that the expressions communicate the organisms’ state and thereby allow a prediction of the organisms’ likely behaviour was a central point in this argument. Yet, Darwins view has been disputed and rejected by those who considered facial expressions as exclusively or predominantly social or cultural signals, which are not linked to underlying states. Research by Ekman and colleagues (Ekman 1973; Ekman and Friesen 1971; Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth 1972; Ekman, Sorenson and Friesen 1969) as well as Izard (Izard 1971a, 1971b) initially vindicated Darwins idea that at least some basic emotional expressions are universal and directly associated with an underlying emotional state (see Hwang and Matsumoto, this volume, for a defence of this view, and Jack and Russell, both this volume, for criticisms). To this day, this view has been repeatedly challenged by those who consider emotion expressions to be purely social signals or social constructions unconnected to an underlying state (Barrett 2013; Fridlund 1994).

Emotions and Their Expressions

Introduction Expressions such as ‘I see the anger in his face’, ‘I can hear the disappointment in her voice’ and ‘[s]he felt him trembling with fear’ imply that the emotions of others are things that we can sometimes perceive – that is, things that we can see, hear and feel. However, one might think that, strictly speaking, the perceptual language here is misleading. One might, that is, think that when we say things like this, we do not really mean that the others state of mind is perceptible in the same way that ordinary objects in our visual field are perceptible. Rather, to say, ‘I see the anger in his face’, is to offer a kind of shorthand for something like this: I see him make a facial expression that people commonly make when angry, and so infer that he is angry. So, ordinary locutions such as ‘I see the anger in his face’ are misguided. They imply that emotions, like ordinary objects, are perceptible, and that behaviours that express our emotions enable non-inferential knowledge of them by others. But in fact there is no literal perception of emotions; at most what is perceived are behaviours that express the emotions, and our knowledge of others’ emotions is always mediated by our knowledge of other things, so that, even in paradigmatic cases where we take ourselves to recognize someones emotion in their behaviour directly , what we do is infer the presence and character of the emotion on the basis of behavioural evidence. Note, however, that if our ordinary language is misleading in this way, then it is also misleading with respect to the relationship between emotions and their expressions. We often describe faces as happy or relieved, voices as anxious, joyful or scared, bodily demeanours as embarrassed or confident and so on. (Indeed, as one author has observed, there really appear to be no independently characterizable kinds under which, for example, the facial expressions associated with sadness, or joy, fall, but that ‘can be described without reference to the emotions’ – Peacocke [2004]: 66.) Our descriptions of expressive behaviours suggest that we take the emotions to be embodied in the behaviours that express them – the relief is somehow right there in his face , the joy is somehow right there in her voice and so on.

Introduction: Emotional Expression

Theorists of emotion typically recognize a number of features common to them: emotions are intentional, being directed towards objects in ones environment (including oneself); emotions involve the evaluation or appraisal of those objects as possessing various positive or negative values; emotions feel a certain way, in that there is something it is like to undergo an emotional experience; and finally emotions are expressed, involving a readiness or disposition to move ones body in a number of ways. Emotional expression in its variety – the topic of this volume of essays – is a phenomenon with which we are intimately familiar. It is something that we experience, both in ourselves and others, on a daily basis. As Edith Stein wrote, somewhat poetically, I blush for shame, I irately clench my fist, I angrily furrow my brow, I groan with pain, am jubilant with joy […] as I live through the feeling, I feel it terminate in an expression or release expression out of itself. (Stein [1917]1970: 51) But is a phenomenological description such as this supported by the scientific study and philosophical analysis of emotional expression? What is it for something to be an emotional expression and how do such expressions relate to other aspects of human psychology and behaviour? A common thought is that emotional expressions serve to communicate the emotional state of the expresser; indeed, the facial expression of emotion is often taken as the paradigm case in which the psychological states of others are made manifest to us (see, e.g., McNeill 2012; Smith 2013). Is this common-sense picture correct? In what sense can emotional expressions be thought of as communicative and what is it that they communicate? Further, emotional expressions are naturally thought to be subject to certain norms: a particular facial expression is required for an apology to be considered sincere, another when receiving a gift and so on. What, we may ask, is the role of such norms in guiding our emotional behaviour and how do they interact with the ‘release’ of emotional expression that Stein speaks of? These questions are amongst those pursued in the chapters of this volume and may be thought to fall under three broad headings: the nature of emotional expression, the communicative role of emotional expression and the normative significance of emotional expression.