Dacher Keltner’s scientific contributions

If Charles Darwin were alive today, he would certainly have been pleased, and probably blushed, to witness the empirical and theoretical developments that his 1872 book, Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, generated. The first four chapters in this part pay homage to Darwin, reviewing literature on how emotion is expressed in the face (Keltner, Ekman, Gonzaga, & Beer), by voice (Scherer, Johnstone, & Klasmeyer), and in language (Reilly & Seibert) in humans, as well as in displays across various nonhuman species (Snowdon). These four chapters generally suggest, with the occasional qualifications that empirical study inevitably requires, that select emotions are communicated in distinct facial and vocal displays and in language, and that this is so across different cultures and in different species. The last two chapters of this part broaden the meaning of emotional expression and ask how emotion is expressed in different art forms, a question that dates back to Aristotle, and certainly earlier. Gabrielsson and Juslin apply methods used in the study of facial expression and voice (i.e., encoding and decoding studies) to address whether and how emotion is communicated in music. Oatley explores the thesis that emotion, and especially misunderstood emotion, inspires expression in pictorial arts, architecture, and literature. In this chapter, we bring together the convergent insights offered by the different authors of this part. We summarize where the field stands on many of the questions that Darwin posed (e.g., How is emotion is expressed? Are these expressions universal?). At the same time, we highlight new developments in the field and suggest directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)