and Friesen 1976, p. 1)
This quote shows that the photographs are the result of the coordination of numerous elements whose direct relationship with the emotions is not stated upfront. It also underlines the fact that the univocal recognition of the emotions represented by these photographs depends upon preliminary theoretical and technical achievements that are embodied both in models with the ability to control their facial muscles and in observers who are expected to associate those muscular configurations with emotions. In other words, the validity of these images lies in the established proof (in the authors’ opinion) of the universality of six so-called basic emotions and of the equivalence between the facial actions and the emotions themselves ; the subsequent development of a standardized technique for describing facial affect, i.e. the Facial Affect Scoring Technique (FAST) (Ekman, Friesen and Tomkins 1971) ; the quality of the photographs ; the ability of the actors to activate their face in precise ways ; and the statistical consensus obtained from the observers. The POFA set is the answer to Ekman and Friesen’s intention to reproduce in the laboratory typical expressions of emotion whose scientific reliability can be validated, since they judge expressions of emotion captured in reality to be experimentally problematic due to their contextual contingence (Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth 1972).
Nevertheless, it seems paradoxical that the primary tool that allowed these researchers to prove the universality of the emotions and develop the FAST consists precisely of photographs of the facial expression of emotion which they judge to be insufficiently reliable. In fact, between 1966 and 1970, Ekman and his colleagues show groups of people in more than twenty countries a series of photos provided by their mentor, Tomkins, according to the following protocol : the subjects are shown photographs of facial affect, one by one, for about ten seconds. These photos represent portraits of Caucasian-type men and women 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 