Facial Displays are Tools for Social Influence
The positive alternative to the emotion-readout account of the face, and the reading this corpus prefers because it is ecological in structure. Where basic-emotion theory treats a facial movement as an involuntary display of an internal state, the behavioural ecology view developed by Fridlund and extended here treats facial displays as social tools: acts directed at an audience, signalling trajectories of likely action and negotiating what happens next, shaped by the relationship and the situation rather than by what the sender happens to be feeling. A smile is not necessarily happiness leaking out; it may be an appeasement, a greeting, an invitation or a warning, and which it is depends on who is present and what is at stake. The strongest support is the audience effect, well documented across species and situations: displays intensify with an audience present and diminish in solitude, which is difficult to explain if they are readouts of internal states and straightforward if they are communicative acts. The consequence for interpretation is severe and useful. A signal read without its context has not been read at all, which is the same discipline ecologists apply to an indicator species, and the same reason a raised eyebrow cannot be scored as contempt on a checklist. The account is contested: basic-emotion theorists argue it underweights the coherence between expression and physiology, and the field has not settled. Read as the strongest available statement of the position, not as consensus.
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