Sorry I’ve been quiet for so long… holidays, horror, the usual…

Anyhow, I’ve stumbled upon this very interesting article I thought you guys might get a kick out of.

Researchers looked at blind and sighted athletes to see if their facial expressions when winning and losing were the same. The theory is that the blind athletes, who cannot see the cultural norms of facial expression as babies and children, only have “innate” expressions that are genetic and not learned. They found that all athletes – blind or not – made the same facial expressions. This was true even across cultural boundaries. Thus they say that there is strong evidence that our facial expressions are not learned but inherent in our genetic code.

While I think this article is interesting, I wonder at whether the main assumption is true. The idea that blind cannot have ‘learned’ social expressions seems a bit of a stretch. After all, while they cannot see, they can and do feel, and may throughout their lives have touched enough faces to know what is expected. Do blind people not know what a smile is or how to make one? Of course they do, at least as adults. Why would we expect that they, through reading/etc, would not have learned to smile when happy? This is particularly true since the study looked at only emotional responses, which I could see being learned from books which describe such things in detail.

I think that there is still room for learning facial expressions even if you cannot see them. I think instead the study would be more convincing if they looked at the facial expressions of young children instead of adults, who, perhaps, have not had the time to learn social norms. Although the fact that the facial expressions were the same across cultural boundaries is also interesting and perhaps even more revealing than the differences between blind and sighted individuals.

Citation: David Matsumoto, Bob Willingham (2009). Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion of Congenitally and Noncongenitally Blind Individuals Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96 (1-1), 1-10