情绪的面部表情.doc

The Behavioral Ecology View of Facial Expression In recent years the Neuro cultural View has come under attack from an approach to facial expression that not only emphasizes its strategic character as a signal, but also goes beyond this difference of emphasis to challenge its status as a readout. Heinroth nearly a century ago introduced the idea of intention movements: actions that are truncations of larger acts that sufficiently resemble those larger acts to be predictive of them. The baring of teeth sufficiently resembles the onset of a bite to be predictive of an impending bite; as a result the baring of teeth can be a signal of an impending attack. Because the ability to give an indication of future action can be adaptive both for the sender and for the recipient of the message, a disposition to bare teeth in potentially agonistic situations can have survival value for both parties. Generalizing this idea, many authors including Andrew (1963a, b) and Smith (1985) have suggested that expressive behavior be construed as a form of signaling in which the signal predicts with reasonable accuracy the organism’s likely future course of action, and it may do so without being a truncation or icon of any such action. Thus a growl is not a truncation of an attack but is nevertheless a belligerent signal. If the Neuro cultural View may be caricatured with the word ‘romantic’, suggesting that emotions are emanations of what is within; this new line of thought may perhaps be given a cartoon representation with the word ‘pragmatic’, where what matters about emotional displays is not that they are a key to what is within, but rather to what the organism is liable to do in the future, and how effectively it will do it. Andrew sums up this distinction when he writes, “It is probably truer for a man to say, ‘I would like to hit you’ than for him to say ‘I am angry.’” (1963b, p. 5). Andrew would presumably make a similar remark concerning the significance of a belligerent signal, t