The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals - Influence

Influence

The lavish style of scientific illustration was followed in work on animal locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and James Bell Pettigrew (1832–1908); and - to a lesser extent - in D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form (1917).

Darwin's ideas were followed up in William James' What Is An Emotion ? (1884) and Walter Cannon's Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1915) - in which Cannon coined the famous phrase fight or flight response. On 24 January 1895, James Crichton-Browne delivered a notable lecture (in Dumfries, Scotland) On Emotional Expression, presenting some of his reservations about Darwin's views. In 2003, the New York Academy of Sciences published Emotions Inside Out: 130 Years after Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a compendium of 37 papers with current research on the subject.

"George Herbert was wrong when he said that man was all symmetry; it was woman to whom that remark applied....evolution is still going on, and the faces of men and women still altering, for the better, every day. The emotions are less violently expressed....our ancestors gave vent to their feelings in a way that we would be ashamed of, and their range of feeling seems to have been in some degree more limited. The language of the countenance, like that of the tongue, has been enriched in the process of the suns." James Crichton-Browne (Thursday, 24th January 1895) On Emotional Expression, being The Presidential Address, Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society.

"All these sensations and innervations belong to the field of "The Expression of the Emotions", which, as Darwin (1872) has taught us, consists of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose. These may now for the most part have become so much weakened that the expression of them in words seems to us to be only a figurative picture of them, whereas in all probability the description was once meant literally; and hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words...." Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (1895) Studies on Hysteria.

Freud's early publications on the symptoms of hysteria (with their concept of emotional conflict) acknowledged debts to Darwin's work on emotional expression. Darwin's impact on psychoanalysis was discussed by Lucille Ritvo. The biology of the human emotions was more fully explored by Desmond Morris in his popular book Manwatching.

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