Emotion Perception in Hadza Hunter Gatherers

Do configurations of facial movements like widened eyes and a gasping mouth carry the same emotional meaning across societies? Relatively few studies have addressed this question in small-scale human societies using discovery oriented methods. To help fill this gap, we examined emotion perception in members of the Hadza hunters and gatherers. Hadza perceivers, when asked to provide their own labels for posed configurations of facial movements, neither produced the emotion terms that have been proposed as universal; nor did many of their labels refer to internal experiences. Instead, Hadza individuals, when compared to a US sample, frequently labeled facial poses with action terms. When Hadza participants were provided with descriptive scenarios that contained information about the situation and were tasked with choosing the best-matching configuration of facial movements, they again were less likely to choose the configurations proposed as universal when compared to a US sample; they performed well above chance on affect perception, however, matching pleasant and unpleasant situation descriptions to facial configurations portraying pleasant and unpleasant states, respectively. We discuss these findings with reference to prominent evolutionary approaches to understanding emotion: a classical view of emotion that proposes facial expressions are evidence of innate, adaptive responses to recurring fitness challenges in our hunter-gatherer past and a constructionist view that proposes domain general evolved capacities, combined with emotion knowledge enbrained by cultural evolution, to produce perceptions of emotion.