We don't make WEIRD faces: A brief history of emotion expression research in small-scale societies

摘要

Research in the social sciences has largely relied on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) participants, yet scholars tend to use findings from such WEIRD samples to draw conclusions about human psychology at large. There is, however, one prominent area of psychological science drawing on evolutionary theory that marks a major exception to this trend: research on the nonverbal expression of emotion. We briefly review the major findings from this literature, highlighting the ways in which researchers have effectively used participant samples from "maximally divergent populations" to address questions about universality and, in turn, the evolutionary basis of nonverbal displays.