ABSTRACT
Some years ago, a student in a graduate seminar on the emotions raised a question that perhaps should be considered seriously by developmental psychologists. The class had been discussing emotion recognition studies of the sort that employ posed facial expressions of categorical emotions. The student noted that the model's expressions appeared exaggerated and artificial. She further pointed out that people normally do not make such highly articulated, emotionally intense expressions and wondered what sense such studies made. The professor responded that indeed, these posed expressions could be regarded as symbols, symbols whose referents, nonetheless, could be readily identified by others. The question of why these symbols are so readily identifiable, and how emotion signals become symbols, developmentally, however, was anybody's guess at that point.
