who was the first researcher to suggest that facial expressions are pre-verbal
Facial expression The universality hypothesis is the assumption that certain facial expressions and face-related acts/ events are signals of specific emotions (happiness with laughter and smiling, sadness with tears, anger with a clenched jaw, fear with a grimace, surprise with raised eyebrows and wide eyes along with a slight retraction of the ears, and disgust with a wrinkled nose and squinted eyes— emotions which frequently lack the social component of those like shame, pride, jealousy, envy, deferance, etc.) and are recognized by people regardless of culture, language, or time. The belief in the evolutionary basis of these kinds of facial expressions can be traced back to Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Reviews of the universality hypothesis have been both supportive[18][19] and critical.[20][21] Work in 2013 by Nelson and Russell[22] and Jack et al.[23] has been especially critical.
Gestalt psychology The concept of gestalt was first introduced in philosophy and psychology in 1890 by Christian von Ehrenfels (a member of the School of Brentano). The idea of gestalt has its roots in theories by David Hume, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Immanuel Kant, David Hartley, and Ernst Mach. Max Wertheimer's unique contribution was to insist that the "gestalt" is perceptually primary, defining the parts it was composed from, rather than being a secondary quality that emerges from those parts, as von Ehrenfels's earlier Gestalt-QualitÃ¤t had been.[citation needed]