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An analysis of the work of Paul Ekman, arguably the most influential figure in the emotion field today. According to Ekman's "neurocultural" version of Tomkins's affect theory, through socialization we expand the range of stimuli that can elicit our basic emotions and can learn to deliberately moderate our facial movements according to the conventions of "display rules." But under certain conditions the underlying basic emotions will betray themselves in micro-movements of the face discernible only to the trained expert. To clarify the methodological issues at stake in Ekman's research, the chapter discusses problems raised by his use of photographs of posed facial expressions as an experimental tool. It also explores the implications of Ekman's fundamental physiognomic assumption that a distinction can be strictly maintained between authentic and artificial expressions of emotion based on a differences between the faces we make when we are alone and those we make when we are with others. Throughout the discussion the aim is to bring out some of the tensions and contradictions inherent in Ekman's affect program model. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the influential neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's related claims about the emotions.

This chapter focuses on Alan J. Fridlund's critique of Ekman's Basic Emotion Theory. One reason for the success of Ekman's theory is that it appears to solve the problem of deception in everyday life by suggesting that expressions have evolved to convey accurate information to others about our internal emotional states. On this model, although we are able to disguise our feelings through the voluntary management of our facial signals, under the right conditions the emotional truth of our inner states will betray itself. It is on the basis of this model that Ekman has played an influential role in federally-funded post-9/11 surveillance research. Ekman's goal is to ameliorate fears about our own tendencies to dissimulate, by providing a technological means by which authentic facial expressions can be reliably distinguished from false ones. In opposition to Ekman, and based on experiments demonstrating the influence of context and audience on emotional expressions, Fridlund denies that emotions can be divided up into a limited set of affect programs or categories. On Darwinian principles, he offers instead an intentionalist, ethological or "behavioral ecology" account of human and non-human animal behavior that challenges the entirety of Ekman's neurocultural model of the emotions.

William James argued that bodily changes are essential to an emotion; they are what put the ‘emotionality’ into emotion. There is good empirical evidence that some bodily responses are universal for particular emotions. Paul Ekman has demonstrated that there are universal spontaneous facial expressions for the ‘basic’ emotions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness, and contempt. There is also evidence that many emotional responses are inbuilt or very easily acquired, such as the human fear of snakes. Robert Zajonc's research shows that some emotional responses happen too fast for ‘higher’ cognitive processes to be involved.

Chapter 1 argues that Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can serve as a foundational text for a humanities approach to emotion, but only if it is first disentangled from its heavy-handed editor Paul Ekman and his basic emotions program, which has done Darwin a profound disservice. So liberated, the chapter then argues, Darwin's science of emotion provides a reference point for scholars in the humanities now trying to make their literary criticism speak to natural science. The photograph, illustration, and story-filled Expression is both rhetorical and inseparable from its science that we sometimes imagine transcending its bookish material. This chapter recalls how Darwin's Expression foregrounds the inherent rhetoricity of emotion, thereby outstripping Ekman's science of emotion that claims to follow in its wake, and which has recently found some advocates in the new subfield of Cognitive Approaches to Literature. Instead, the chapter argues that Darwin's rhetoric of emotion is remarkably skeptical, which does not diminish its scientific piquancy, but rather aligns it with our situated theories in the science of cognition mobilized, among other places, by the philosopher of biology Alva Noë.

The American psychologist Richard Lazarus played an important role in the post-World War II history of research on the emotions. This chapter offers an analysis of the challenges he faced in his attempts to account for the meaning of the emotions. Lazarus's ideas about the role of "appraisal" or cognition in emotion were often tentative and confused, in part because of the difficulty he had in deciding what kind of claim it is that emotions are intentional states or actions. Is the claim fundamentally a constitutive-conceptual one, according to which it belongs to the very "grammar" of the emotions that they are intentional states? Or is the claim a causal argument about how emotions are aroused? Are those two kinds of claims incompatible, or can one adopt both a conceptual-grammatical and a causal explanation of the affects? Lazarus did not find it easy to answer these questions, even as he pursued a major research program designed to do so. The aim of this chapter is to examine Lazarus's experiments on the emotions and appraisal in the light of these difficulties.

Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism claim that some human emotions are inherently good, and others almost always afflictive, destructive, and bad. Compassion is in the first category, whereas anger is in the second. This chapter examines arguments from Korean neo-Confucianism and Buddhism for classifying moral emotions as wholesome and unwholesome, non-afflictive and its relevance to contemporary ethics and moral psychology. Taxonomies of emotions from Paul Ekman, P.F. Strawson, Buddhism, and neo-Confucianism are critically discussed in relation to the “four-seven debate” in Korean neo-Confucianism and in relation to Buddhist debates about poisons in human nature.