 of various ages “spontaneously” playing emotions without reference to any kind of standardization of their expressions. The subjects must then choose from a list of six predefined basic emotions the one emotion that they believe corresponds to the image. The only exception is the study carried out with illiterate populations in New Guinea. Being unable to use a system of written lists, the researchers take inspiration from a protocol used with pre-school-age children and tell a story that evokes an emotional situation, with the subject having to choose from three photographs the one most compatible with the situation. Next, the researchers ask certain Papuans to mimic the expressions they would express with their own face if they found themselves in the situations described. The photographs of facial affect thus obtained are submitted to the judgment of American students. The high level of accord in the identification of emotions among the different cultures leads Ekman and his colleagues to the conclusion of the universality of the six basic emotions, even though photos of the facial affect of fear were rarely interpreted as expected by the subjects from New Guinea who failed to discriminate between expressions of fear and expressions of surprise. By contrast, those two emotions were reliably distinguished from expressions of anger, sadness, joy and disgust (Ekman 1998). Apparently, this element was not enough to rattle the thesis of the universality and the pan-culturality of the six emotions which the researchers had stipulated as basic. This point is striking when we know that the photos of the facial affect of fear from Ekman and Friesen’s set are widely used in research on the emotions in cognitive psychology and the neurosciences (Leys 2010), particularly in research on the neural bases of adolescent behaviors, as mentioned in the Introduction. The philosopher Ian Hacking (1998) has pointed out that LeDoux’s reference work on the neurosciences of the emotions, titled The Emotional Brain, should rather be titled The Fearful Brain, given the centrality of fear and its correlative states — anxiety, neuroses, phobias, panic or post-traumatic stress — in the author’s conception of the emotions. According to LeDoux, the emotions are complex neuronal systems that have evolved in order to permit survival. It is not a question of conscious feelings but of a cerebral production that comes from a “deeper” level (LeDoux 1998).
With respect to the results of the research that Ekman and his collaborators carried out in New Guinea, Hacking suggests that “one may well wonder whether the three groups, i.e. the American students, the primitive men of New Guinea and the researchers, did not collaborate to produce these phenomena” (1998, p. 11). In other words, he proposes that the protocol used in the experiments that strove to demonstrate the universality of the emotions through their pan-cultural expressions produced a circulation of knowledge and expectations among the researchers, the American subjects and the subjects from New Guinea which contributed to the existence of an understanding in the association of photographic portraits and of terms associated with emotional states. To this three-way production, I would add the role of the photographs which, in my view, are an integral part of the process of constructing the universality of the six basic emotions. In fact, they represent a common but nevertheless interpretable reference that allows the construction of a shared history around the emotions. In this context, the photos become entities that act upon and mediatize relations between the various actors as much by their capacity to refer to elements in space and time as by their power to incorporate the discourses produced upon contact with them (Edwards 2005).
In order to standardize the description of the expression of the emotions which have henceforth been validated as universal, Ekman, Friesen and Tomkins establish the Facial Affect Scoring Technique (FAST) in 1971. This is a method of describing the facial affect of 