Ekman, however, was fascinated by the mystery of nonverbal communication. He wanted to understand why some people had little trouble decoding the feelings of others, almost as if they were reading an open book, whereas others fell for one con artist after another. His motto was: trust your eyes, not conventional wisdom. The widespread belief then was that facial expressions arose simply from cultural learning: a child in a given culture learned the faces that accompanied particular emotions by observing people, and over time different cultures developed different expressions. Even renowned researchers such as anthropologist Margaret Mead were unconvinced of the existence of a universal repertoire of expressions, as Charles Darwin had proposed in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872 but subsequently ignored.
yc c on 18 Apr 10Robert Plutchik, an American psychologist and professor, developed an emotion theory from 1960s to 80s. He assumed that all emotions result from eight congenital basic emotions that developed evolutionary. I made an attempt to visualise his theory on a poster during Prof. Matthias Krohn's information mapping seminar at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The poster was exhibited at the Leipzig Book Fair from March 22nd to 25th, 2007 in the booth of Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. Project description+ at INCOM.org. Download+ a PDF of the poster (A2). By www.markusdrews.com/
