Facial Affect Scoring Technique: A First Validity Study

In 1862 Duchenne published his Mecanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse electro-physiologique de Γ expression des passions, in which he used "the electrical currents for contraction of the muscles of the face to make them speak the language of passions". In this atlas of the anatomy of emotion, Duchenne delineated many of the muscles whose contractions together contributed to the production of each specific emotional expression of the human face. Although Duchenne was the father of modern kinesiology, of whose work Darwin (1872) had written, "no one has more carefully studied the contractions of each separate muscle and the consequent furrows produced on the skin", later investigators virtually ignored his contributions. Rather than continuing the study of the particular facial muscles which distinguished one from another emotion, the past five decades of psychological research on the face in relation to emotion instead have been devoted primarily to determining what emotion observers can judge from the face (whether their judgments are accurate, what categories of emotion can be judged, etc.). Comparatively few investigators have actually looked at the face itself, applying some measurement procedure