Human Science Explored

Emotion: Fear (Photo credit: Cayusa)

Everyone has experienced emotion to some degree.  From chilling fear to surprise and delight.  These emotions are quite obvious in children who are still quite innocent in the ways of the world.

The human face is believed by many to betray many of these emotions and this view holds that expressions are quite universal, overriding aspects such as  culture and geographical location.  However, this view derived by Charles Darwin and supported by many subsequent studies begs the question: what do these expressions mean and why are they associated with the respective emotions?  There is new evidence that suggests that there may be more at play here than first thought.   Cultural influences may play a more important role and it may be that the six basic themes of happiness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust/contempt and sadness may have nuances which make the whole concept far more complex than previously thought – it is the subject to current research and discussion with perhaps future modification.

This coincides with technology to clone a human face by the Disney Company.  It seems that this technology will make its way into animations and ultimately, humanoid ‘soft’ robots which will then enable a more ‘human’ interaction. I suppose the task of the engineers has been made a little harder by those pesky psychologists who are  saying that humans are more complex than the six basic themes. Oh life would be a lot easier for a lot of people if humans were simpler and behaved themselves according to physical laws.

But then, psychologists aren’t real scientists are they?  The author of this article decries the methods that psychologists use to describe and understand human behaviour.  Believe it or not, mate, it’s an extremely difficult task – doesn’t really fit in with testing for the Higg’s boson in the CERN but probably at least as difficult.  Similar to doing microbiology without a microscope.  But as technology improves as does our understanding of the extremely complex mechanism called the human brain, we’re getting better.  Sort of like how a real science like genetics made changes markedly after DNA was fully understood and the mechanisms behind how genes are expressed are developed.

After all, chemistry became a science after ancient chemists practised alchemy.