Are Emotions Hard-Wiredd Or Universal?

A long standing debate exists in the social sciences and biological department regarding whether emotions were hard-wired and universal or rather, learned and culturally specific (Elfenbein, Ambady,Mandal, Harizuka, 2002) Since the beginning of the universality debate, the central goal has been to identify which face movement patterns were common across cultures and which ones were culture specific (Chen & Jack, 2017). Within the past decade, however, perspectives have begun to change (Chen & Jack, 2017). Researchers have recently started to explore the idea that emotion, and specifically the expression of emotion, may be more complex than commonly realized (Scherer, Clark-Polner, & Mortillaro ,2011). However, according to (Chen

Darwin, one of the earliest proponents of universality claimed similarities in facial expressions which he based on his evolutionary theory (Darwin, 1999). He ascribed facial expression to a creator and believed that once the language of facial expression had been created, it gave all human beings the automatic ability of always expressing their feelings by contracting the same muscles which rendered the expression of emotions common and immutable (Darwin, 1999). Darwin thought that some basic facial expressions served as both an adaptive and biological function in the regulation of sensory exposure in the expression of emotions (Darwin, 1999). In addition, through biological origins, facial expressions were the universal language in signalling internal emotional states that were recognized across all cultures (Darwin, 1999). In agreement with Darwin, William James asserted that emotion was the subjective experience of physiological changes which occurred within human bodies (Scherer, et.al., 2011). He believed that the expression of emotion emerged from very basic biological processes which was uniform within the human species (Scherer, et al., 2011). Moreover, the idea that emotion should be relatively universal began to gain explicit recognition and this can further be seen with Silvan Tomkins, in his Neo Darwinian theory of emotion. He assumed that humans shared affect states with other animals and that human expressions were also shared over cultures (Scherer, et al., 2011). Furthermore, a group of researchers influenced by Tomkins, Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard, became the first to demonstrate the universality of emotion expression empirically, and reported that individuals from different cultures could recognize each other’s expressions of emotion with much greater accuracy than would have been expected by chance (Sauter, et al.,