The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

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1. dredmorbiusSep 2022
   The "problems" identified with the Kübler-Ross model seem to be twofold:

   - That the popular perception of the model is not what Kuber-Ross herself had in mind and communicated. This can hardly be laid on her.

   - That the empirical research, and it was both, has subjective elements and is again interpreted in contradiction of K-R's statements as some specific sequence of phases.

   I'd bring to this a few additional observations:

   Emotions seem to be common among at least many mammalian species. That is, both that they're a shared inheritence, and an evolutionary one. This isn't a novel observation, and the connection between emotion and evolution was first proposed, at book length, by Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotions...>.

   Grief is one of those emotions. The notion of animal grief is well developed and much studied (see the Wikipedia overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_grief>). It seems highly likely that it serves some positive adaptive purpose.

   As studied by K-R, one characterisation of the grief observed was of a profound change in the worldview of the patients themselves. That is, coming face to face with their own mortality or morbidity.

   There is also at least an anecdotal understanding of stages of grief being associated with challenges to individual or group worldviews, paradigms, or understandings. This can be seen in, e.g, responses to the notions of limits to growth, in politics, and other social contexts.

   What I suspect, though I've not come across any clear expression of this in scholarly literature, is that what we call grief is in actually part of a spectrum of responses to radical shifts in understanding of one's world. And that the stages, or perhaps more accurately phases or expressions relate to unlearning and relearning new patterns. That there's a value in not dropping a particular model too quickly, but that similarly there's not value in blindly holding on to a model which clearly no longer serves any specific use.

   The lack of any significant discussion of these elements at least to my knowledge has long struck me as distinctly odd. Checking Google Scholar currently I find at least some theoretical work, e.g., Doka Understanding Grief <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813155...> and Hall, Bereavement theory <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02682621.2014.90...>, though by the blurbs, these don't seem to take the leap I'm suggesting.

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2. dredmorbiusApr 2022
   There's strong evidence that some animals, at least, process visual stimuli similarly to humans, as illustrated by cats responding to the "rotating snakes" illusion:

   https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CcXXQ6GCUb8

   And if you pause to consider that emotions, particularly such core and foundational ones as love (maternal, partner, tribal) are all but certainly evolved, then existence of them or precursors in other species seems all but certain. That thought had occurred to Charles Darwin, who wrote a book on the question, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

   https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.175687

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3. dredmorbiusJul 2020
   A few years ago, thinking of emotions, their ubiquitous appearance in human ccultures and history, and many aanalogues amongst other animals, that these must represent some deep evolutionary role, and adaptive benefit. I then wondered if there were anything in evolutionary biology literature that addressed this.

   As it turns out, one of Charles Darwin's last published books is The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Chapter XII addresses self-attention: shame, shyness, modesty, blushing.

   https://archive.org/details/expressionofemot1872darw/page/31...

   You might care to reasses your casual dismissal of shame's relevance.

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4. dredmorbiusMar 2019
   Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals by Darwin, Charles

   Publication date 1873

   https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43657/page/n3

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5. jonmc12Feb 2018
   The author's implied premise that a smile is a universal form of emotional expression vs a cultural adaptation was presented in the Darwin paper he cited: "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals". Interestingly, a 2012 paper tested this hypothesis:

   "In sum, our data directly show that across cultures, emotions are expressed using culture-specific facial signals. Although some basic facial expressions such as fear and disgust (2) originally served as an adaptive function when humans “existed in a much lower and animal-like condition” (ref. 1, p. 19), facial expression signals have since evolved and diversified to serve the primary role of emotion communication during social interaction. As a result, these once biologically hardwired and universal signals have been molded by the diverse social ideologies and practices of the cultural groups who use them for social communication."

   "Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal", http://www.pnas.org/content/109/19/7241

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6. daviOct 2008
   I agree.

   But I clicked through anyway, and, looking through the pictures, I started thinking about the stereotypy of emotion al expression, which reminded me that someday I should read Darwin's "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" (http://human-nature.com/darwin/emotion/contents.htm).

   So, no upvote for the article, but not totally useless to me, either.

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