Inside-Out: From Basic Emotions Theory to the Behavioral Ecology View

Basic emotions theory (BET) is the most popular and deeply rooted psychological theory of both emotion and the facial behavior held to express it. We review its Western foundations and the key developments in its evolution, focusing on its parsing of facial expressions into two kinds: biological, categorical, iconic, universal “facial expressions of emotion,” versus modified, culturally diverse versions of those iconic expressions due to intermediation by learned “display rules.” We suggest that this dichotomy and its many corollaries are oversimplified, and that many of BET’s recent modifications are inconsistent in ways that may render it impossible to test and immune to falsification. In contrast, we suggest that the behavioral ecology view of facial displays, as an externalist and functionalist approach, resolves the quandaries and contradictions embedded in BET’s precepts and extensions.