Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

366 | HOW THE MIND WORKSing six emotions. He showed them to people from many cultures, includingthe isolated Fore foragers of Papua New Guinea, and asked them tolabel the emotion or make up a story about what the person had gonethrough. Everyone recognized happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust,and surprise. For example, a Fore subject said that the American showingfear in the photograph must have just seen a boar. Reversing theprocedure, Ekman photographed his Fore informants as they acted outscenarios such as 'Your friend has come and you are happy," "Your childhas died," "You are angry and about to fight," and 'You see a dead pig thathas been lying there for a long time." The expressions in the photographsare unmistakable.When Ekman began to present his findings at a meeting of anthropologistsin the late 1960s, he met with outrage. One prominent anthropologistrose from the audience shouting that Ekman should not be allowedto continue to speak because his claims were fascist. On another occasionan African American activist called him a racist for saying that blackfacial expressions were no different from white ones. Ekman was bewilderedbecause he had thought that if the work had any political moral itwas unity and brotherhood. In any case, the conclusions have been replicatedand are now widely accepted in some form (though there are controversiesover which expressions belong on the universal list, how muchcontext is needed to interpret them, and how reflexively they are tied toeach emotion). And another observation by Darwin has been corroborated:children who are blind and deaf from birth display virtually the fullgamut of emotions on their faces.Why, then, do so many people think that emotions differ from cultureto culture? Their evidence is much more indirect than Darwin's informantsand Ekman's experiments. It comes from two sources that cannotbe trusted at all as readouts of people's minds: their language and theiropinions.The common remark that a language does or doesn't have a wprd foran emotion means little. In The Language Instinct I argued that the influenceof language on thought has been exaggerated, and that is all themore true for the influence of language on feeling. Whether a languageappears to have a word for an emotion depends on the skill of the translatorand on quirks of the language's grammar and history. A languageaccumulates a large vocabulary, including words for emotions, when ithas had influential wordsmiths, contact with other languages, rules forforming new words out of old ones, and widespread literacy, which