I love, love, love teaching about emotion! While schools are increasingly adding emotion-based learning starting as young as middle school, some students have never had this programming before (I, sadly, didn’t), so it can be really fun and empowering to discuss what emotions are, how they are processed in the body, how they serve us (or don’t), and how we convey social information to others.
When I was doing a review of emotion literature for my dissertation, I quickly found that you can’t write an emotion paper without somehow citing Paul Ekman. One of his (many) contributions to the field was his Universality Hypothesis. Rather than explaining it to students, I show them in a game I invented called “Name That Emotion!”
I start off with a task for students. They need to draw 6 faces in a random placement on a piece of paper. Each of those faces should convey one of the following emotions:
Anger
Fear
Sadness
Disgust
Surprise
Happiness
I give them a few minutes to complete the task (but not too much, because it’s not an art assignment!) before they turn to their partners to see if they can guess each other’s drawings. And, I can tell you that they can do so with amazing accuracy. Disgust seems to be the most difficult to draw. Some get fear and surprise confused. But still, I would ay 90% accuracy all around. My students this year generously donated their drawings. Can you tell which ones are anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and happiness?
So, why are we so good at this?
There is an argument to be made that we evolved to have a means of communicating social information in the absence of spoken language. Ekman argued that these specific emotions were expressed the same across all peoples and cultures, and he employed some really intriguing tools to test that hypothesis.
The Universality Hypothesis still enjoys considerable scientific play today, and the evolution of the field of neuropsychology has called his ideas into question. That’s the thing about theories – they are not scientific laws! Rather, they’re constantly being studied and adapted as we get new and better information.
I can say that it’s incredibly rewarding to see how adept teenagers are at recognizing emotions; it really shows how far they have come in terms of their social development and sophistication. And, it’s intriguing to think how, even when we work hard to suppress our emotions, our faces may be giving us away.
You might also like my Paul Ekman meme.
