Page "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" Paragraph 7

The proofs, tackled by his daughter Henrietta (" Ettie ") and son Leo, required a major revision which made Darwin " sick of the subject and myself, and the world ".

It was to be one of the first books with photographs-with seven heliotype plates-and the publisher John Murray warned that this " would poke a terrible hole in the profits ".

In the event, the published book displayed an extraordinary assembly of illustrations-almost in the manner of a Victorian family album-with engravings of the Darwin family's domestic pets, portraits by the faintly disreputable Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander ( 1813 – 1875 ) (" of Victoria Street, London "), anatomical diagrams by Sir Charles Bell ( 1774 – 1842 ) and Friedrich Henle ( 1809 – 1885 ) and illustrational quotations from the Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine-Analyse Electro-Physiologique de L ' Expression des Passions ( 1862 ) by the eminent French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne ( 1806 – 1875 ).

Darwin was careful to ensure Duchenne's agreement to his association with the project and the two men corresponded briefly.

Duchenne's involvement brought a dramatic and psychological dimension to Darwin's book-he had been a powerful influence on Jean-Martin Charcot ( 1825-1893 )-Charcot often referred to Duchenne as " mon maître " (" my teacher ") and sat with Duchenne on his deathbed.

Duchenne's complicated classic introduced a number of novel themes, including clinical photography and his technique of the electrical stimulation of the facial muscles supplied by the seventh cranial ( facial ) nerve.

On 8 June 1869, Darwin sent his copy of Duchenne's book to Crichton-Browne, seeking his opinion.

Crichton-Browne seems to have mislaid the book in his asylum for almost a year, causing Darwin some anxiety ; but, on 6 June 1870, the book was returned, along with a photograph of a patient in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, with her hair in a state of occasional erection ( Darwin Correspondence Project: Letter 7220 ).

Darwin incorporated this illustration into the text-Figure 19, page 296-of the Expression of the Emotions.

Two years later, Crichton-Browne invited David Ferrier to Wakefield to conduct experiments on the electrical stimulation of the motor centres in the brain.

The lavish style of scientific illustration was followed in work on animal locomotion ( co-ordinated movement ) by Eadweard Muybridge ( 1830 – 1904 ) and James Bell Pettigrew ( 1832 – 1908 ); and-to a lesser extent-in D ' Arcy Thompson's masterpiece of mathematical biology On Growth and Form ( 1917 ).

Darwin himself, inveterately original, moved from animal locomotion-and emotional life-to the puzzles of insectivorous plants and The Power of Movement in Plants in his book of that title in 1880.

Much of the theme of mental evolution-the biological acquisition of mental powers-was taken up by George Romanes ( 1848 – 1894 ).

As the torch of anti-Darwinism passed from the theologians to the social scientists, Darwin's biological interpretation of the emotions was to prove something of a dead-end for a century or so.

Anthropologists like Margaret Mead emphasised the cultural determinants of emotional expression, arguing that expression varies fundamentally from one culture to another.

However, empirical research by Paul Ekman and others has shown this view to be misconceived.

Since around 1970, in an atmosphere newly receptive to the biological approaches to human behaviour, it has become clear that there were distinguished scientific contributions which followed up on Darwin's ideas.

These include William James ' What Is An Emotion?

( 1884 ), Walter Cannon's Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage ( 1915 )-in which Cannon coined the famous phrase fight or flight response-and Schachter and Singer's ( 1962 ) studies on the interaction of social, psychological and physical factors in the generation of emotional states.

On 24 January 1895, James Crichton-Browne delivered a notable lecture ( in Dumfries, Scotland ) On Emotional Expression, discussing some reservations concerning Darwin's formulations, emphasising the role of the brain and hands in emotional expression, touching on the issues of gender and expressive asymmetry, and on the relationship of physical expressions to language.

Thorstein Veblen's sociological classic The Theory of the Leisure Class ( 1899 ) assumed an evolutionary perspective and advanced a persuasive narrative concerning the elaboration of gesture and posture into a culturally encoded system of decorum and good manners.

In 2003, the New York Academy of Sciences published Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years after Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a Compendium of 37 papers with current research on the subject.

It is noteworthy that Freud's early publications on the symptoms of hysteria-with their influential concept of emotional conflict-acknowledged debts to Darwin's work on emotional expression, that Freud's later The Interpretation of Dreams ( 1900 )-a work which lingered on the immediate presentation of mental processes-contained no illustrations, and that Darwin published nothing on dreams as a mode of emotional expression.

Indeed, Darwin's approach in The Expression has been criticised for neglecting the communicative aspects of expression.

Freud's concepts concerning the psychological aspects of the human body were developed further-notably including the concept of body image-by the neuropsychiatrist Paul Schilder and by the psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff in her books on the psychology of gesture and the human hand-and an exhaustive discussion of Darwin's impact on psychoanalysis was provided by Lucille Ritvo.