Reactions to The Expression of Emotions

Abstract

The chapter describes how psychologists and biologists reacted to Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions, which has been called the first book on Evolutionary Psychiatry. The reactions of psychologists have been mixed over the years. Evolution became an element of the Functionalist school of American psychology in the early 20th Century, but evolution was ignored by the Behaviorist school of American psychology for the rest of the century. As the chapter explains, it was not until the end of the century that a group of U.S. researchers began the field of Evolutionary Psychology to apply evolutionary principles to understand the cognitive processes underlying human culture and social relationships, including gender roles, mate selection, and parental investment. The Expression of Emotions and evolutionary theory, in general, had a more profound and sustained effect on the field of ethology, which originated in Europe as a branch of biology that studies the evolutionary adaptiveness of instinctive behavior in animals. The chapter introduces the ethological concept of fixed-action patterns in animals, which has implications for understanding certain human psychiatric symptoms, as discussed in later chapters. The chapter also explains the relationship between Aristotle’s four causes and the modern scientific concepts of the proximate causes (or proximate mechanisms) and the ultimate causes of behavior (and anatomy), and gives examples of the proximate causes and ultimate causes of territorial aggression in animals and eating in humans.