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 actors moving their face according to the indications produced by the FAST, one observes that they proceed more from a mosaic than from a transfer of the “real” onto paper or screen. They are the final result of a particular arrangement of a number of images that have circulated in the hands of researchers, actors and observers according to a tautological relationship between the proof and the tool of the proof, being transformed into a consensual object whose faculty is to provoke a unique meaning — for example, the exclusive function of a photograph of a facial expression of fear is to evoke fear — independent of the age or sex of the subjects represented or of the observers. By considering their utilization in the context of experiments in the cognitive neurosciences, I will now interrogate their part in the construction of a difference between adolescents and adults, but also between young girls and young boys, in the management of emotional information. In other words, I hope to understand how these purportedly universal emotional stimuli participate, through the visual translation of fMRI, in producing specific characteristics, in this case of age and sex.
From Photography to Scan Image of Adolescent Emotions : A Visual Translation that Produces Age and Sex.
Since 1999, the date of the first experiment to use Ekman and Friesen’s set of photographs of facial expressions, complementary studies have been carried out using such stimuli in the field of research devoted to the adolescent brain (for example, Killgore, Oki and Yurgelun-Todd 2001, Monk et al. 2003, Yang et al. 2003, McClure et al. 2004, Killgore and Yurgelun-Todd 2005, 2006, Yurgelun-Todd and Killgore 2006). According to researchers in the cognitive neurosciences, this work has taken part in the establishment of a neurobiological model of adolescence, postulating that young individuals experience the perceptible effects of a gap in development between the limbic and the prefrontal regions of the brain. The former, implicated in emotional reactions, is