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Contemporary Alternatives to the Affect Program Theory

Cultural relativism about emotions, now known as social
constructionism, has undergone something of a revival in recent years
(Harré 1986). The older relativist tradition rested its case on
anthropological fieldwork. The modern revival relies less on empirical
data and more on conceptual argument. Many social constructionists
start from the widely accepted idea that emotions involve a cognitive
evaluation of the stimulus. They argue that emotions will inherit the
cultural differences in the way emotion stimuli are conceived. If two
cultures think differently about danger, then, since fear involves an
evaluation of a stimulus as dangerous, fear in these two cultures will
be a different emotion. This argument does not impress universalists,
many of whom will allow that the two emotions are interestingly
different but maintain that their similarities are more than sufficient to
make them the same thing, namely fear. As well as purely semantic
disputes of this kind, relativists and universalists focus on different
parts of the domain of emotion. The affect program states seem to
require minimal cognitive evaluation of the stimulus via pathways that
the neuroscientist Joseph le Doux has christened the low road to
emotion (Le Doux 1996). Social constructionists often refuse to regard
these isolated physiological responses as emotions, reserving that
term for the broader cognitive state of a person involved in a social
situation in which they might be described as, for example, angry or
jealous. It is thus unclear whether the debate between contemporary
social constructionists and their universalist opponents has a
substantial factual dimension, or whether it reflects only a preference
on the one side for tractable, reductive explanations and a desire on
the other side to forestall the scientific neglect of the social,
transactional aspects of human emotion.
The main contemporary alternative to the affect program theory is the
paralanguage theory of emotional expressions, a view whose leading
exponents are Fridlund (Fridlund 1994) and James A. Russell (Russell
and Fernendez-Dols 1997). Paralanguage theorists argue that the
affect program theory exaggerates the automated nature of emotional
expressions and neglects their voluntary, performative aspect. They
deny that facial expressions are involuntary expressions of discrete
emotional states. Paralanguage theorists have accumulated
considerable evidence of audience effects on the production of
emotional expressions. They take this to show that expressions are
produced for the benefit of the audience rather than to express the
feelings of the person making the display. They question the affect
program view of emotions themselves, as well as of emotional
expression, arguing that emotional states vary continuously along
several axes, rather than falling into a few discrete
types. Paralanguage theorists argue that the experimental results of
Ekman and his collaborators are largely artifactual. They are
particularly critical of the use of forced choices from a list of emotion
terms dictated by the experimenter. This procedure forces a range of
responses to a range of facial signals into a few boxes defined by the
experimenter. The critics argue that this cannot provide evidence for
the existence of a limited number of stereotyped facial expressions,
since this assumption is built into the experimental procedure.
Although paralanguage theorists criticize the experiments usually
taken to establish the universality of emotion, some of them accept
that emotional expressions have evolved and would therefore
presumably expect the flexible signaling system they postulate to be
at least substantially pancultural. Fridlund argues that an evolutionary
perspective actually favors the paralanguage view, since involuntary
signals of true emotional state would be subverted by the evolution of
dissimulation and deceit. While this is an important perspective on the
evolution of emotional expressions, it does not constitute the decisive
argument that Fridlund seems to suppose. Veridical signals do evolve
in nature, often by making use of so-called hard to fake signals. The
cost of being unable to suppress a signal of emotional state may be
balanced by the advantage of being believed. A purely theoretical
argument based on the evolutionary dynamics of signaling systems
seems more likely to support the view that ‘examples of emotional
behavior lie along a continuum from expression to negotiation’
(Hinde 1985, p. 989) than a purely expressive or purely manipulative
picture of emotional expression.