Excerpts taken from Dr. Paul Ekman’s scientific autobiography, Nonverbal Messages: Cracking the Code (pp. 70-74) January 22, 2018 As I was preparing to make my second trip to New Guinea, I knew that even if I obtained strong results supporting Darwin’s claim of universals in facial expressions, I would need to explain why so many smart anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, had come to believe that expressions were culture-specific.
So, I came up with the term display rules- rules we learn in the course of growing up about who can show which emotion to whom, and when.
Display rules can specify that an emotional expression be suppressed, de-amplified, exaggerated, or even masked altogether. Since display rules operate primarily in public,
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