Page 166 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

shoulders. People like Jarillo and Crivelli are simply arguing that you can’t understand emotion
without taking culture into account.
To quote psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett—one of the leaders in challenging the Ekman view
—“emotions are…made and not triggered.” (See her book How Emotions Are Made [New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017], p. xiii.) Each of us, over the course of our lives, builds our own
set of operating instructions for our face, based on the culture and environment we inhabit. The face
is a symbol of how different human beings are, not how similar we are, which is a big problem if
your society has created a rule for understanding strangers based on reading faces.
For a good summary of this new line of research, see L. F. Barrett et al., “Emotional expressions
reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion in human facial movements,” Psychological Science
in the Public Interest (in press), as well as Barrett’s Emotions (cited above).

Photos of Pan-Am smile and Duchenne smile: Jason Vandeventer and Eric Patterson,
“Differentiating Duchenne from non-Duchenne smiles using active appearance models,” 2012 IEEE
Fifth International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS) (2012):
319–24.
Facial Action Coding System units for Ross looking through door: Paul Ekman and Erika L
Rosenberg, eds., What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression
Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), Second Edition (Oxford University Press: New
York, 2005), p.14.
a kind of billboard for the heart: Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals (London: J. Murray, 1872). Ekman has written extensively on Darwin’s contributions to the
understanding of emotional expression. See Paul Ekman, ed., Darwin and Facial Expression (Los
Altos, Calif.: Malor Books, 2006).
The plaintiff was Ginnah Muhammad (in footnote): Ginnah Muhammad v. Enterprise Rent-A-
Car, 3–4 (31st District, 2006).
For an introduction to the Jarillo-Crivelli study on Trobriand islanders, see Carlos Crivelli et al.,
“Reading Emotions from Faces in Two Indigenous Societies,” Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General 145, no. 7 (July 2016): 830–43, doi:10.1037/xge0000172. Also from this source is the chart
comparing success rate of Trobrianders with that of Madrid students.
dozens of videotapes of judo fighters: Carlos Crivelli et al., “Are smiles a sign of happiness?
Spontaneous expressions of judo winners,” Evolution and Human Behavior 2014,
doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.009.
he watched videotapes of people masturbating: Carlos Crivelli et al., “Facial Behavior While
Experiencing Sexual Excitement,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 35 (2011): 63–71.
Anger photo: Job van der Schalk et al., “Moving Faces, Looking Places: Validation of the
Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES),” Emotion 11, no. 4 (2011): 912.
Researchgate.

Namibia study: Maria Gendron et al., “Perceptions of Emotion from Facial Expressions Are Not
Culturally Universal: Evidence from a Remote Culture,” Emotion 14, no 2 (2014): 251–62.
“This is not to say…freighted with significance”: Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On
Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), p. 73.
Two German psychologists…ran sixty people through it: Achim Schützwohl and Rainer
Reisenzein, “Facial expressions in response to a highly surprising event exceeding the field of
vision: A test of Darwin’s theory of surprise,” Evolution and Human Behavior 33, no. 6 (Nov.
2012): 657–64.
“The participants…emotion-face associations”: Schützwohl is drawing from a previous study: R.
Reisenzein and M. Studtmann, “On the expression and experience of surprise: No evidence for
facial feedback, but evidence for a reverse self-inference effect,” Emotion, no. 7 (2007): 612–27.
Walker put a gun to his ex-girlfriend’s head: Associated Press, “‘Real Smart Kid’ Jailed, This
Time for Killing Friend,” Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review, May 26, 1995,
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/may/26/real-smart-kid-jailed-this-time-for-killing-friend/.