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 the six emotions in terms of wrinkles, tension or relaxation in specific features of the face and the positions of those features. This analysis is done by dividing the face into three areas : the forehead and brow, the eyes and the bridge of the nose, and the lower face. As the authors explain,
Specifying the appearance of some of the components within a facial area required such lengthy, awkward descriptions, which sometimes even then were insufficient, that it became obvious that the only way to make clear to scorers just what was being described was to imitate the appearance ourselves or show a photographic sample. (Ekman, Friesen and Tomkins 1971, p. 41)
Getting around the difficulty of verbally describing the facial characteristics of each emotion, the FAST materializes in three sets of photographs of men and women performing the features of the basic emotions, each set portraying one area of the face, along with a few verbal instructions regarding the position of the head and the direction of the gaze, the purpose being to reach, through rationalization and abstraction, the elements essential to the representation and the recognition of the basic emotions. As the authors emphasize,
The rationale for using as many different stimulus persons as possible was to test FAST’s ability to ignore differences in facial appearance associated with age, sex, and physiognomy, and differences in lighting and contrast that would occur across pictures of different people. (Ekman, Friesen and Tomkins 1971, p. 43)
In other words, it is a matter of constructing images of the facial expression of the universal emotions consistent with the universality of the expression and the recognition of the basic emotions. As for fear and disgust, Ekman, Friesen and Tomkins (1971) concede that difficulties in the univocal identification of those emotions prevented them from obtaining the hoped-for number of photographs, without, however, explaining or drawing any conclusion from this observation.
To return to the POFA set obtained from ac