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Naturalistic facial evidence supports biological and social regularities, but gives limited support to a universal one-to-one code for basic emotions. The relevant contrast is between describing a facial movement and inferring its cause. The same visible action can accompany an emotional episode, communicate affiliation or serve a task. A strong basic emotion theory needs independent evidence linking a category of felt emotion to a characteristic pattern across situations, rather than defining the category by the pattern it is supposed to explain.

Posed photographs are useful controlled stimuli, but agreement about them answers a different question from why people move their faces in ordinary life. Forced-choice emotion recognition supplies observers with labels and alternatives; it can encourage consensus even when spontaneous descriptions would differ. Recognition of a prototype also does not establish that its full configuration occurs frequently in lived episodes. Naturalistic studies should therefore code movements independently of a category judgment, record the social setting, and obtain an independent indicator of experience where possible. The Facial Action Coding System helps separate visible actions from their interpretation; anatomical coding is not itself a measurement of feeling.

Robert E. Kraut and colleagues' 1979 observations make the methodological issue concrete. At a bowling alley, bowlers were especially likely to smile while socially engaged, including when facing companions, rather than simply after a successful delivery. Observations in other settings also implicated social engagement. Bowling supplies identifiable outcome events and changes of orientation towards an audience, so it offers a useful setting for separating success from immediate social contact. However, a good score is an imperfect indicator of what that individual feels at that instant; the study cannot infer the absence of happiness merely from a lack of smiles.^[ref]

María-Ángeles Ruiz-Belda and colleagues addressed this limitation in 2003 by adding reports of feeling in field studies of bowlers and soccer fans. Among those reporting happiness, smiling was much more probable during social interaction than outside it. The key contribution is the separation of reported happiness from the presence of a smile, not merely the observation that social people smile. Reports still have timing and reconstruction limitations, and social interaction can itself alter felt intensity. Nevertheless, these observations are difficult to reconcile with the simple claim that happiness reliably releases a smile regardless of audience.^[ref]

The evidence does not require treating biological expression and communication as mutually exclusive. An inherited movement repertoire could become selectively deployed towards partners. Conversely, describing a smile as communicative does not show that its producer lacks happiness. A display rule may suppress or amplify a response. But if every absent expression is retrospectively called suppression and every unexpected expression is called a disguise, the claim loses predictive content. A useful version must specify the circumstances of suppression independently and predict differences before seeing the faces.

Evidence from blindness strengthens the case for a biological contribution without settling the strong universality claim. David Matsumoto and colleagues compared spontaneous expressions of congenitally blind, noncongenitally blind and sighted athletes. Similarities show that visual imitation is not necessary for all features of the observed repertoire. They do not remove social experience, other sensory learning, shared anatomy or competition-related goals. Nor do they establish a unique correspondence between each movement and a consciously felt category.^[ref]

A complementary result concerns interpretation rather than natural production. Rachael E. Jack and colleagues used generated dynamic faces and reverse correlation to estimate observers' category representations. Cultural differences in those representations challenge a single universal observer code. This is not direct evidence that the same cultural groups make different spontaneous movements in every emotional situation. Production and interpretation require separate tests.^[ref]

A decisive programme would sample episodes rather than only successful examples, include nonsocial and social periods within the same people, and obtain time-linked reports without prompting a fixed inventory of categories. Facial coders should be blind to reports and outcomes; analyses should distinguish within-person effects from differences between people. Researchers should test the entire distribution: how often a movement occurs without the proposed feeling, and how often the feeling occurs without the movement. A distinctive expression might still be informative without being necessary or sufficient. To establish a specifically basic category, the pattern must also outperform alternatives based on emotional valence, emotional arousal, action and social intention.

The strongest evidence concerns inherited bodily capacities, response repertoires and learning biases; it does not establish a complete immutable package for each mature emotional category. Asking what is hardwired requires distinguishing several propositions. An innate behavior may have an inherited developmental basis without appearing fully formed at birth. An early response may depend on prenatal experience. A universal pattern can reflect shared environments as well as common inheritance, and a biological mechanism can remain modifiable through development. These possibilities prevent a simple equation of innate with early, universal or unchangeable.

An emotional episode has several emotion components: evaluation, feeling, bodily regulation, expression and action. Evidence about one component should not be silently transferred to the others. The inherited organization of the autonomic nervous system and skeletal muscle supplies important response capacities. It does not follow that a particular heart-rate change means fear, or that everyone uses an identical muscle configuration whenever anger is felt. Common physiological resources can be recruited in different combinations for different goals and situations.

Cross-cultural expression research provides evidence about shared capacities, with a qualification about the task. Paul Ekman and colleagues' 1971 study used story-to-photograph judgments in New Guinea and found substantial agreement for several proposed categories. This matters because agreement cannot be attributed solely to participation in the same Western experimental setting. But supplied stories, selected photographs and response alternatives test a constrained matching ability. They do not directly measure the prevalence of those configurations in spontaneous episodes or establish the same spontaneous category boundaries everywhere.^[ref]

Blindness comparisons help separate a specific learning route from a shared capacity. David Matsumoto and colleagues' 2009 competition observations included congenitally blind athletes. Their similarities with sighted athletes suggest that seeing and copying facial examples is unnecessary for all aspects of expression. This is stronger evidence against a purely visual imitation account than a comparison between sighted cultures alone. It is not evidence for development in the absence of experience: blind athletes still have bodily feedback, social interactions and nonvisual information. Competition-related expressions also do not identify the whole content of conscious feeling.^[ref]

The clearest intermediate position is prepared learning. Michael Cook and colleagues in 1989 used edited videos in which a model monkey's fearful behavior appeared directed towards different objects. Observer monkeys acquired stronger fear-related responses to fear-relevant objects, including toy snakes or a toy crocodile, than to comparison objects such as flowers or a toy rabbit. Editing helps control the demonstrator's fearful behavior while varying its apparent object. The experiment therefore tests selective acquisition rather than simply comparing encounters in the wild.^[ref]

Preparedness in psychology makes sense of this result without calling the acquired response present from the start. An inherited bias in attention, association or defensive learning could influence what is easily learned, while observation supplies which object is dangerous. However, unequal learning need not uniquely prove genetic specification: the object classes differ perceptually, and laboratory rearing is not absence of all earlier experience. Further work should control exposure histories and perceptual salience and examine generalization to new exemplars. The experiment supports constrained observational conditioning, with evolutionary interpretation requiring additional evidence; it does not demonstrate an unlearned conscious human fear of every snake.

Social context further limits claims of a complete fixed programme. An inherited ability to smile can coexist with acquired display rules, context-sensitive audiences and strategic communication. Cultural differences in dynamic expression representations found by Rachael E. Jack and colleagues concern how observers interpret faces. They show that the decoding system is not adequately described by one universal template, while leaving room for shared sensory and motor resources. Naturalistic dissociations between reported happiness and smiling likewise challenge a rigid output rule rather than the existence of a biological contribution.^[ref]

The content of cognitive appraisal also develops. Concern about a predator may build on defensive capacities, whereas shame over breaking a locally valued rule requires learning that rule and understanding the social relation. This does not make one purely biological and the other outside biology. It distinguishes inherited capacities for learning, evaluation and bodily regulation from the learned situations, categories and conventions through which those capacities operate. Inferring a specific subjective state from a newborn's grimace, an animal's avoidance or a single neural response would go beyond the measured component unless independently justified.

An informative research programme therefore specifies an inherited contribution at a particular level: anatomy, sensory bias, learning rate, action tendency or category-specific coordination. It compares developmental and cross-cultural trajectories, controls relevant experience where possible and asks which predictions are unique to the proposed mechanism. Neither similarity alone nor variability alone settles innateness. Shared development can produce similarity; inherited systems can produce variable outcomes when inputs differ.

Social appraisal explains an important route of interpersonal influence, including influence without deliberate emotion labeling, but it is not established as the sole explanation of implicit transfer. The first task is to distinguish outcomes. Interpersonal emotion transfer occurs when another person's reaction changes one's own emotion. Emotional contagion more specifically involves matching affect; facial mimicry is a congruent motor response and need not include a matching feeling. A common event can also change two people's feelings independently, creating correlation without interpersonal transfer.

Social appraisal theory proposes that another person's reaction supplies information about an event's significance. A companion's unease may make an uncertain decision seem riskier; their excitement may suggest an opportunity. The observer's relationship, goals and assessment of the companion's knowledge affect the interpretation. Such evaluation can be rapid and nonverbal. Therefore an absence of consciously naming the companion's anxiety is not sufficient to rule out social appraisal. Equally, if appraisal is invoked whenever any influence occurs, the account loses the independent mechanism needed for an explanation.

Brian Parkinson and colleagues' 2009 diary study collected accounts of decisions involving other people from 41 participants over three weeks. Reports of participants' anxiety and excitement related to the emotions attributed to the other person. Risk and importance appraisals partly accounted for the anxiety relationship, but did not eliminate the other person's predictive contribution. The design provides evidence outside a single laboratory induction and connects interpersonal affect with reported evaluative content. It is also observational: shared circumstances, selective reports and unmeasured interpretations remain alternatives.^[ref]

In particular, statistical adjustment does not settle the causal route. Imperfectly measured appraisal can leave a residual association even if the underlying process is entirely evaluative. Conversely, partial statistical mediation does not establish that changing the measured appraisal would change feeling: a shared cause can affect both. A residual after adjusting for explicit perceptions of another's feeling is compatible with implicit transfer, but is not a direct awareness manipulation and does not prove that every appraisal was absent. The diary findings support a mixed-process interpretation more readily than a clean estimate of independent automatic and cognitive pathways.

Rapid muscular effects supply a different kind of evidence. Ulf Dimberg and colleagues in 2000 presented happy, angry or neutral target faces for 30 milliseconds, followed by neutral masking faces. Surface recordings over facial muscles revealed differential responses consistent with the target expressions, despite masking intended to prevent conscious target perception. This shows that some facial responding need not await a deliberate instruction to imitate. It does not establish that the observer felt the corresponding happiness or anger, or that evaluation of significance was absent.^[ref]

The distinction between motor matching and feeling is supported by Ursula Hess and colleagues' 2001 study of weak, dynamic expressions. It found evidence of mimicry across the tested expression types, and evidence of emotional contagion for happiness and sadness, but its mediation analyses did not confirm a link from mimicry to contagion or recognition. This is evidence against assuming that observing a matching muscle response automatically establishes the whole mimicry–feedback–feeling sequence. It is not proof that such a route never operates: measurement precision and the tested setting bound a negative result.^[ref]

Appraisal also predicts complementary responses that a simple matching rule misses. Gerben A. van Kleef and colleagues in 2004 supplied emotional information about an opponent during computer-mediated bargaining. Participants made larger concessions to an angry than to a happy opponent, with evidence that information about the opponent's limits mattered. Another's anger can signal difficulty or threat and prompt one's own caution rather than matching anger. These experiments establish an informative interpersonal function of emotion communications; their explicit messages do not by themselves demonstrate unconscious appraisal in the masked-face paradigm.^[ref]

The theories can therefore be partly complementary. A face can evoke facial mimicry, alter an appraisal of the situation, and attract attention at the same time. Facial feedback may contribute to feeling, but the 2019 synthesis gives no warrant for assuming a strong obligatory effect from every small muscular response. Learned associations, shared stimulation and report expectations also require consideration. Calling a process implicit must specify what is unavailable to awareness: the expression, the change in one's own state, or the causal relationship between them. These are distinct experimental claims.

A stronger discriminating experiment would vary the displayed reaction independently of the common event and independently of the expresser's relevance to that event. The same ambiguous display could come from an informed adviser or an uninformed observer; a common physical elicitor should be matched across conditions. Predictions about perceived risk, goals and the resulting feeling should be specified before measurement. If appraisal is the route, changing the informational relevance should alter the predicted evaluative content and transfer, beyond differences in face visibility. Testing a mimicry route requires an independent manipulation with a motor control condition: facial restriction can itself alter effort and attention, so it is not automatically a selective intervention on feedback.

The experiment should record facial electromyography, time-linked appraisals and felt-state reports separately. Awareness tests should be appropriate to the actual target-mask sequence and sensitive enough to bound residual discrimination. Randomizing expressions supports their total causal effect, whereas establishing causal mediation still needs control of mediator–outcome confounding or a defensible mediator intervention. Mere disappearance of one regression coefficient after adding another is insufficient. Nor should repeated observations from the same participant or pair be treated as independent replications.

Primary publication: doi.org/10.1080/02699930302288

Publication text or primary record: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29715720/

Cognition and Emotion 17, 315–326; field observations combined with reported happiness.