john b. watson was the first researcher to suggest that facial expressions are pre-verbal.
john b. watson was the first researcher to suggest that facial expressions are pre-verbal.
who was the first researcher to suggest that facial expressions are pre-verbal?
john b. watson
scientific research on nonverbal communication and behavior was started in 1872 with the publication of charles darwin's book "the expression of the emotions in man and animals". in the book, darwin argued that all mammals, both humans and animals, showed emotion through facial expressions. he posed questions such as: "why do our facial expressions of emotions take the particular forms they do?" and "why do we wrinkle our nose when we are disgusted and bare our teeth when we are enraged?" darwin attributed these facial expressions to serviceable associated habits, which are behaviors that earlier in our evolutionary history had specific and direct functions. for example, a species that attacked by biting, baring the teeth was a necessary act before an assault and wrinkling the nose reduced the inhalation of foul odors. in response to the question asking why facial expressions persist even when they no longer serve their original purposes, darwin's predecessors have developed a highly valued explanation. according to darwin, humans continue to make facial expressions because they have acquired communicative value throughout evolutionary history. in other words, humans utilize facial expressions as external evidence of their internal state. although "the expression of the emotions in man and animals" was not one of darwin's most successful books in terms of its quality and overall impact in the field, his initial ideas started the abundance of research on the types, effects, and expressions of nonverbal communication and behavior.
nonverbal communication
while there remains a general gap in the literature regarding the production of facial expressions and the processes which underlie this production at middle childhood and adolescence ages, research has been done to assess the overall production capabilities of children ranging in ages 5–13. results generally indicate that the ability to produce facial emotion increases with age and is slightly correlated with the ability to discriminate the facial expressions of another. odom and lemond (1972) created a study to test the potential for "a developmental lag between the perception and production of facial expressions," meaning they were looking to uncover a relationship between previously created schemas and mental representations of different expressions and the ability to transform these representations into facial expression. they operated using the logical assumption that coding perceptions of expressions comes before the discrimination of expressions which then precedes production. upon assessing two differing age groups, one in kindergarten and the other in fifth grade, they discovered that there is a lag between perception and production of facial expressions, however this lag does not decrease with age. production and discrimination do not develop at the same rate. odom and lemond (1972) have arrived at the far conclusion that production of facial expressions will never be at the same level of discrimination of facial expressions, which supports the findings of another study by izard (1971) who found that even adults have difficulty producing requested expressions. despite this, the increased accurate productions of the older kids was found to be due to their discrimination abilities yet the older children still made many errors leading researchers to believe that full discrimination abilities are not at full potential at the middle childhood and adolescence stage of development.
developmental differences in solitary facial expressions