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This review aims for clarity. Clarity about emotions and emotions only.
Why is clarity about “emotions” necessary? An entire field of neuroscience/neuropsychoanalysis, pioneered by Panksepp, Damasio, Solms, Yovell, and others (Solms 2019), has been exploring “affective neuroscience,” which they have called the study of “emotions,” or “feelings.” But “feelings” include experiences such as my fingertips hitting this keyboard, or an eructation, which presumably are not included in affective neuroscience. And the “emotions” they describe—here's the rub—are not those outlined by Darwin in 1872, and certainly not what emotion researchers have studied since the mid-1960s. “Emotions” for these researchers are discrete phenomena that while challenging to articulate are known to all. Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) described six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, and fear. Here I will review Erika Rosenberg and Paul Ekman's update on the empirical basis for the facial expression of these emotions, even as Ekman (2003) has laid out nonfacial expressions of emotions in an earlier book (as for shame, awe, and schadenfreude).
So what do emotion researchers mean by emotions, and how does this help psychoanalysts in clinical work? This new book helps answer these questions.
The book's subtitle further defines the area of study: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System
(FACS). As this review is meant for psychoanalysts, I will concentrate on the book's study of human emotions. Those interested in chimpanzees, dogs, and horses can read further in the volume's first section. (Yes, horses have the same kind of facial musculature as humans.)
This 627-page volume has much to say about human facial expression, as may be surmised from the titles of the remaining six sections: 2. “Automated FACS Measurement” (e.g., as used by Pixar in the animated movie Inside Out; 3. “Basic Affecti